Going Over The Good & Bad For UEFI On Linux

Another one of the interesting talks that was recorded from Linux.Conf.Au in Ballarat, Australia last week was the presentation by Matthew Garrett. He went over the good and bad of UEFI support under Linux.

Of the Linux.Conf.Au 2012 presentations already covered on Phoronix have been that of the XFS file-system and Ubuntu's plans for ARM, but the Phoronix-recommended presentation to watch today is the UEFI talk by Matthew Garrett.

Matthew Garrett is the one at Red Hat that's been working quite extensively on UEFI support under Linux, since this BIOS successor is beginning to be found in all new hardware. He's the one that's been shouting how UEFI Secure Boot will cause big problems for Linux. He's also worked on matters like better reboot support and finally fixing the ASPM Linux kernel power regression.

While Secure Boot is what's usually brought up when mentioning Linux and UEFI in the same sentence, there's much more to this new architecture than just a locked-down boot process in an attempt for greater security. UEFI does provide some good like better variable storage, no longer needing to pound out Assembly, greater device capabilities and more. But besides Secure Boot being a major pain for Linux and other non-Windows operating systems, another big problem with UEFI has been all of the bugs uncovered in different hardware devices.

Watch Matthew Garrett's LCA 2012 presentation below for all of the details about the state of UEFI under Linux. The talk is entitled "EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it's awful."