*countable infinities only

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-06-25 at 23:31 -0400, Peter Jones wrote:

> > I know that UEFI hardware is available.
> >
> > Which hardware do you recommend, if I want to actually see the
> > UEFI and perhaps try it out?
> 
> I'm really, *really* not in the business of recommending hardware. There
> are various sites on the internet that do that exclusively. One of them has
> probably figured out that they should be thinking about UEFI by now.

To elaborate, there still seems to be an unwarranted confusion between
UEFI and Secure Boot going on here.

UEFI-based hardware is available right now and has been for some time. I
am typing this on a system with UEFI firmware. Many many systems shipped
today are using UEFI-based firmware, though often the copy of Windows
that's pre-installed is BIOS-native not UEFI-native, and often the
firmware will default to booting other media in BIOS compatibility mode
and will only use native UEFI if explicitly instructed to.

Secure Boot is a single feature of a later version of the UEFI spec. To
my knowledge, no hardware currently generally available is Secure
Boot-enabled. Peter, Matthew etc. are all working with pre-production
development firmware.

Presumably, updates could be shipped which add Secure Boot functionality
to already-shipped hardware, I don't know if there are any plans for
that. But you cannot, right now, go out and buy hardware that has Secure
Boot functionality off the shelf. It's just not there.

If you're really interested just in playing with UEFI itself - like
Peter I'm not a hardware recommendation site, but I use an Asus P8P67
Deluxe for my UEFI testing, and it's at least capable of successfully
booting and installing Fedora UEFI native. I don't know if this is true
of later Asus motherboards.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net