> The secure boot patches have been around in the Fedora tree for a > while > now. > They work well enough but there has not been much active work in > getting > them accepted upstream in recent years. The longer they exist out of > tree > the harder they get to maintain without extra support. If there isn't > a > path for the current secure boot patch set to be accepted upstream, > we > need > to seriously consider if it's worth carrying long term. > > Thoughts?
So, how would we handle secure boot moving forward?
How are other distros handling this? Does upstream have an alternative?
There isn't one unified answer. Every distro seems to be doing something different because upstream hasn't provided a single solution.
Moving forward, we would treat secure boot like feature that is still in progress. This means taking the existing secure boot patches or a new approach and submitting them in a way that's acceptable to the upstream community. This is also code for "I don't know but what we have isn't sustainable so let's discuss something better".
Of course.
What patch set are Red Hat and CentOS using? If they're not all using the same thing is it viable to get them all using the same thing?
They're using the same basic thing, but CentOS 7 and it's grandfather are based on a 3.10 kernel, so there's a gulf of difference in the codebase of that and current Fedora kernels, meaning there's no way they're going to be using exactly the same code. And once it works one particular way in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it's unlikely to be swapped out wholesale for the "new and improved" upstream way until the next major RHEL release. Enterprise stability and stuff. So yeah, no, you really can't get them all using the same thing. The kernel codebases are just faaaar too different for a fairly invasive patchset that touches bits and pieces all over the place in core areas.
You're right, distros aren't going to swap out what they have in existing releases for the new hotness. I'd like to believe that if there was a workable upstream solution many distros would choose to converge on that for a future release with a corresponding kernel version. Maybe we will have to maintain some version of these patches for older kernels like Cent OS but newer kernels could be common.
Sounds like a good topic to be bought up at plumbers conf.
P