Secure Boot Improvements Coming To Ubuntu 14.04

Another one of the vUDS sessions worth mentioning this week was on the planned improvements to the UEFI Secure Boot support.

There's two work items officially on the record for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS when it comes to Secure Boot. The first item is supporting the shim fallback.efi, to provide boot recovery options like restoring bootable support when moving UEFI disks between systems or when the system's firmware is lost.

The second Secure Boot change planned for Ubuntu 14.04 is integrating support for kernel signature enforcement an option that's recorded in the system's NVRAM. The reasoning behind this is so users have better control over Secure Boot enforcement and without needing to utilize vendor-specific firmware user-interfaces.

Other potential Secure Boot work for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is IPv6 Secure Boot netbook support, updating to shim 0.5+ upstream, improving the installer user-interface on UEFI systems, and support for rebooting into the system's firmware menu.

More details on the Secure Boot happenings for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS can be found via the Etherpad notes and the video embedded below.