Linked by diegocg on Tue 11th Dec 2012 15:15 UTC
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RE[3]: Comment by kaiwai
by Alfman on Thu 13th Dec 2012 05:18
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by kaiwai"
kaiwai,
Well, I certainly agree with that.
It's easy to point the finger exclusively at MS due to their involvement, but I'm afraid of what might happen if others follow. As you've noted, other mobile device vendors (including apples&androids) already lock down their OS with different levels of success. I have every reason to believe that those who locked-down non-UEFI devices will switch to secure boot just as MS does to restrict end-user modifications on future UEFI devices.
If that actually happens, we'll end up with a plethora of standard ARM UEFI devices (yay), most of which will prohibit any owner override (boo).




Member since:
2005-07-06
At one point Intel used to sell ARM processors so maybe in the future we'll see Intel use the same underlying architecture but bolt the ARM ISA on top of it thus giving them the architectural edge whilst maintaining compatibility with the rest of the ARM ecosystem (Qualcomm IIRC licences the ISA but has their own CPU design).
Yay for standardisation. Boo for dictated secure boot.
Secure boot is an interesting situation given that the argument made regarding ARM was the fact that it was a new form factor for Microsoft but what they were doing was pretty much bringing it inline with other vendors who also make life difficult (note the cottage industry of 'rooting' Android devices - so much for 'open source' and 'freedom' if you're required to hack the crap out of a device you've just bought just so you can receive timely Android updates - but I digress). If there is something that needs to occur it is a move away from locking down devices because some wanker at a mobile phone carrier has a control freak fetish or some good intentioned know it all thinks it is their job to stop the end user from being a moron.
For me whether they standardise around UEFI (minus secure boot or at least have the option to turn it off) or CoreBoot with maybe the UEFI or OpenBoot payload - it doesn't really matter as long as there is some sort of standardisation that doesn't require developers to write thousands of lines of code that should be idealy shared between different vendors and the code divergence occurring around the edges rather than at the core.