02.25.13
Torvalds Curses Over UEFI Stupidity, Gets Upset at Red Hat (Updated)
Summary: Red Hat an accomplice in Microsoft’s restricted boot plans and Linus Torvalds is not happy
Torvalds’ complaints about UEFI restricted boot are nothing new. That anticompetitive scheme from Microsoft is polluting the kernel with binaries which merely serve to help discriminate against Linux and Torvalds has just opened his mouth again, sending out a “NSFW Red Hat rant”:
Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has again vented his spleen online, taking on Red Hat employee David Howells with a series of expletive-laden posts on the topic of X.509 public key management standard.
The action takes place on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, with Howell posting a request that Torvalds “pull this patchset please”.
Howells wants the patchset pulled so Red Hat can “”embed an X.509 certificate containing the key in a section called ‘.keylist’ in an EFI PE binary and then get the binary signed by Microsoft.” This arrangement, he suggests, is more elegant than the way the Linux kernel signs certificates today. Torvalds’ initial response is “Not without a lot more discussion first”, because “Quite frankly, this is f*cking moronic. The whole thing seems to be designed around stupid interfaces, for completely moronic reasons. Why should we do this?”
For future reference, here is the original context dated Thursday, 21 Feb 2013 15:47:58 (GMT). Thanks, Torvalds, for doing the Right Thing® in this case. █
Update: Linus Torvalds To Secure Boot Supporters: This Is Not A Dick-Sucking Contest
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Needs Sunlight said,
February 25, 2013 at 12:40 pm
It looks like what he shot down was a proposal to introduce, among other problems, a M$ dependency inside the kernel itself.
NotZed said,
February 25, 2013 at 6:10 pm
Of course he would very likely not have this headache at all if he had converted the kernel to the GNU GPLv3. It could have been done, but commercial interests and perhaps some ego/vanity stopped it.