EFI In Linux 4.14 Will Better Handle Rebooting Of Buggy Systems

[starshipeleven]

Of course. TPM/SecureBoot/... is all about not trusting you, the product, or more recently the training data for corporate AI.

You mean Management Engine perhaps?
TPM is just a storage for hardware keys, SecureBoot can import your own keys too if the OEM didn't close it down.

[starshipeleven]

I'm not a programmer, so I could well be misinterpreting this, but it seems to me like EFI treats programmers coding for it like they are themselves malicious. WTF?

You are misinterpreting this.

This article talks about:

-a workaround to shut down properly a device with EFI firmware when the EFI does not work properly with the "shut down call"

-a call to EFI firmware that tells it to reboot hardware AND to wipe ram to make sure that any secret things you were doing in RAM get wiped and can't be read from a ram dump done after a reboot.

I don't see anything bad in either thing.

[bug77]

I'm not a programmer, so I could well be misinterpreting this, but it seems to me like EFI treats programmers coding for it like they are themselves malicious. WTF?

It's an excuse to lock things down and prevent alternate implementations, as far as I'm concerned.

[Maxim Levitsky]

I'm not a programmer, so I could well be misinterpreting this, but it seems to me like EFI treats programmers coding for it like they are themselves malicious. WTF?

Of course. TPM/SecureBoot/... is all about not trusting you, the product, or more recently the training data for corporate AI.

[duby229]

I'm not a programmer, so I could well be misinterpreting this, but it seems to me like EFI treats programmers coding for it like they are themselves malicious. WTF?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: EFI In Linux 4.14 Will Better Handle Rebooting Of Buggy Systems

There are a few notable EFI fixes to find for the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.14-EFI-Changes