The Microsofters We Sued Helped Microsoft Make GNU/Linux 'Expire' This Year
Last summer: Good Reason to Delete Windows, Not Dual-Boot, and Call Out the Microsofters Who Worked to Impose 'Secure' Boot, Undermining Antitrust Complaints | More: UEFI
In LWN right now (link with a "paywall condom"): "Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems knowingly or unknowingly rely on a key from Microsoft that is set to expire in September. After that point, Microsoft will no longer use that key to sign the shim first-stage UEFI bootloader that is used by Linux distributions to boot the kernel with Secure Boot. But the replacement key, which has been available since 2023, may not be installed on many systems; worse yet, it may require the hardware vendor to issue an update for the system firmware, which may or may not happen. It seems that the vast majority of systems will not be lost in the shuffle, but it may require extra work from distributors and users."
"Mateus Rodrigues Costa raised the issue on the Fedora devel mailing list on July 8. He had noticed a warning that came with "this month's Windows 11 cumulative update
"; it talked about Secure Boot certificates that are scheduled to expire starting in June 2026. Those particular certificates are separate from the one used for shim, which expires much sooner. In any case, the problem of certificate expiration is one that the Linux world will need to tackle."
"The situation is rather complicated. Daniel P. Berrangé pointed to a page at the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) site that describes it. LVFS is the home of fwupd and other tools that are used to update system firmware from Linux. LVFS and fwupd are the subject of an LWN article from 2020."
Yet another way to make Linux not boot, or for "old" machines to "expire". This is the sort of thing we warned about all along (since 2012).
Thank you so much, Matt Garrett.
As one reader put it, "Matt's dirty work for Microsoft is still causing trouble, without him the courts would have likely sided against Microsoft and restricted boot."
Our lawsuits against him [1, 2] do point out the work he did for Microsoft. Some of the issues to be brought up in the High Court this winter are summarised here. █
Also see: [Meme] It Was Only a Matter of Time All Along | Karma or Hubris? Is #TorvaldsWasRight a Thing Now?
