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EFI In Linux 4.14 Will Better Handle Rebooting Of Buggy Systems

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  • #11
    Originally posted by Adarion View Post
    UEFI, TCPA/TPM, it's all a pile of steaming digital restriction and possible backdoor + bloat crap.
    I was trying to install Windows 10 Pro on a laptop, but the UEFI had a Windows 10 Home product key embedded in it, so the windows installer would always use that key even if I told it to install Pro and gave it a Pro key, when the install finished and the laptop rebooted I was greeted with fucking Windows 10 Home. Apparently there is now way to wipe the Windows 10 Home key from the UEFI, I am stuck with it.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by Spazturtle View Post
      I was trying to install Windows 10 Pro on a laptop, but the UEFI had a Windows 10 Home product key embedded in it, so the windows installer would always use that key even if I told it to install Pro and gave it a Pro key, when the install finished and the laptop rebooted I was greeted with fucking Windows 10 Home. Apparently there is now way to wipe the Windows 10 Home key from the UEFI, I am stuck with it.
      SLIC keys (embedded keys in firmware) are not a UEFI thing, also BIOS firmwares had them. Any issue with that is on Windows 10 side, not on board firmware, as board firmware does not give a shit about OS activation keys. UEFI has keys for checking signature of bootloader and other things (with secure boot) but they are not related.

      You tried doing the steps to "upgrade it to pro"? (copy-pasted from MS help material)
      • Select the Start button, then select Settings > Update & security > Activation.
      • Select Change product key, and then enter the 25-character Windows 10 Pro product key.
      • Select Next to start the upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.

      Learn how to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro or Windows 11 Home to Windows 11 Pro, including how to use a valid product key or the Microsoft Store.
      Last edited by starshipeleven; 05 September 2017, 02:02 PM.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by Adarion View Post
        But I hardly have seen old BIOS-based machines messing up a reboot
        Ahem

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        • #14
          Originally posted by Hi-Angel View Post
          lol now I'm wondering, is there an even worse hardware than Bay Trail tablets? How could they have released such a crap, did they even test it?
          I was going to say the same thing! How many quirks/issues this platform have? 1000s?

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          • #15
            Originally posted by Adarion View Post
            UEFI, TCPA/TPM, it's all a pile of steaming digital restriction and possible backdoor + bloat crap. Intel was also not very Coreboot friendly (in nice terms) until they had finally pushed this crapload of UEFI to the masses. Maybe the old BIOS wasn't perfect. But what was it supposed to do? Just boot the computer, and give the user a minimal setup to configure some interfaces and a media where the OS was supposed to be. Then check all attached data carriers for a magic string of boot record and execute that one. Give control to the bootloader who's doing next steps then.
            All that could be done with a few KiB of code - and nobody needed a network stack... or digital restriction management on a FW level.
            An all that stuff runs with maxed privileges, on ring < 0. Unaware for any OS or a possible anti-malware solution.

            Besides, yes, we had crappy ACPI tables all the way back since ACPI was created (MS/intel... no surprise). But I hardly have seen old BIOS-based machines messing up a reboot or bricking if you wrote variables that were supposed to be written (bricked Samsung(?) netbooks anyone?).

            The kernel changes sound good, nevertheless, and overwriting memory on shutdown / reboot is generally a reasonable idea.
            Would you enjoy writing a network boot loader or a NVMe storage driver in 16 bit real-mode BIOS? No, you would not.

            As for bricking if you wrote BIOS variables, no one even knew what the variables WERE in old-style BIOS. They had to be reverse engineered out of BIOS board tools, and if the vendor updated the BIOS your third-party tool WOULD brick the machine.

            Also, regarding Secure Boot and TPM, would you enjoy being infected with a BIOS or UEFI boot malware? Because it has happened. Things like boot mode SMM keyloggers.

            Read http://phrack.org/issues/66/11.html

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            • #16
              Originally posted by andrei_me View Post

              I was going to say the same thing! How many quirks/issues this platform have? 1000s?
              To be honest, it's still better than, say, Oak Trail, which shipped with poulsbo graphics.

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