What is on Your Mind?

No, i meant something that is a little bit more open and friendly to all 'nix distro's. The Mac appears to be apple friendly only, as in you need to have Apple's software on it to be able to upgrade the firmware, and other issues such as BIOS requirements and non-compatability with total ELI booting such that your graphics drivers wont load properly.

However thats verging off topic a little too much. Similar in theory to the Mac I suppose but not similar in practice where it still requires the hardware manufacturers OS to run it properly.

But back to the original point i do have a question, why bother putting Windows on your PC at all? Then you dont have to worry about dual booting.

This issue has been publicly known about in the Linux world since at least May 2011. In fact Jake Edge wrote a long article about it in the June 15th issue of LWN. Moreover, Red Hat participated in the UEFI 2.3.1 specification. If they are now just waking up and realized what they signed off in this version of the specification then somebody in Red Hat badly missed the ball.

All Microsoft is saying is that if a PC vendor wants ship systems with Windows 8 pre-installed they must have secure boot enabled by default, that firmware not allow programmatic control of secure boot (to prevent malware from disabling security policies in firmware), and that PC vendor prevent unauthorized attempts at updating firmware that could compromise system integrity. That is all goodness from a security point of view.

Low end PCs will probably end up without a means to add keys. That is simply the nature of low end low margin manufacturing. High end server-type systems will almost certainly have the right tools to add the appropriate public KEKs (Key Exchange Key) into the platform firmware. See Section 27.5 of UEFI 2.3.1 for all the gory details.

I didn't think too much of this until today. I bought a Gigabyte motherboard (H61M-USB3-B3) that uses an Intel I3 processor with the intention of making a disk-less workstation booting from a Linux PXE server. The only operating system that I had that would boot is Windows Server 2008 R2, all the rest locked up about 90 percent of the way through loading the kernel.

Locking up 90% of the way through booting the kernel doesn't sound like antitrust firmware things, as much as kernels which need to scramble to catch up with yet more creatively broken hardware and firmware. Linux uses many things about the BIOS and chipset in ways Windows doesn't, and when you look in the dusty corners Windows doesn't use, things can be pretty unsightly.

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I had a similar experience with my Tyan Thunder K8W board, where the Linux kernels I had supported the board, but not its hard-drive controller. I had to build a newer Linux kernel inside an ancient IDE drive with barely enough room for anything, before I could get the system using the shiny new SATA drive I got for it.

Actually there are unix/linux desktop systems out there since a very long time - but being proprietary Unix hardware, they are still a lot more costly than the average PC.

Having just had my first experience with a Windows 8 PC, thought I'd note my experiences.

The PC was supposed to come with Windows 7 but came with Windows 8. I took one look at it and thought "No, this will not do". The whole thing's been dumbed down to the point of absurdity. It wants your MSN login to make a user account!

First step, disk-dump the whole PC so I can restore it to win8 if I need to return it. That meant booting a Linux livecd, which turned out to need a few hoops jumped through. It still gave me an ordinary looking boot menu with F9 on POST, but wouldn't even try to boot from CD devices, just ignored them.

Step 1: Disable secure boot. The BIOS complained about this, but let me do it. Surprisingly, Win 8 still booted in insecure mode. The BIOS also still ignored all CD devices.

Step 2: REALLY disable secure boot. I had to disable secure booting on each drive individually.

THEN it would let me boot from CD, and acted like a fairly standard PC. The disk looked weird in fdisk, which I thought might be some insidious encryption or something, but turned out to be an ordinary GPT partition that needed parted instead.

Reformatting with Windows 7 was uneventful. HP pretended they didn't have drivers for it, but it was a relabelled Win7 model, and those drivers still worked.

So, the sky hasn't fallen, some freedom remains. Microsoft has done what it always does -- add more hoops. It's possible you might be stuck in Win 8 if your mainboard manufacturer is stupid and lazy enough to not bother with the disable setting.

Another reason not to be worried: If this becomes the norm among motherboard manufacturers, then soon enough an anti-trust case will emerge.
Either way, it is unclear why they are locking down on the declining desktop market, whereas it is the mobile market where the margins are to be had. This is also the market that their market share is declining in.