Windows 8 hardware on ARM has EUFI secure boot enabled, as demanded by Microsoft on the OEMs and there is no off switch.
Currently they can't force that on the x86/amd64 desktop market, because of anti-trust issues.
But maybe they can force it on the server market ?
Also if Windows 8 would be unpopulair on x86/amd64 and Microsoft lost a large share of the desktop market. In that case they could force it on their desktop market OEMs too.
So if the Year of the Linux desktop ever happend, they have a weapon ready ?
Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:15 UTC (Thu) by ccurtis (guest, #49713)
[Link]
Windows 8 hardware on ARM has EUFI secure boot enabled, as demanded by Microsoft on the OEMs and there is no off switch.
Currently they can't force that on the x86/amd64 desktop market, because of anti-trust issues.
But maybe they can force it on the server market ?
I'm not sure anti-trust is the reason, but this does raise an interesting thought. It seems that AMD may be looking to drive ARM processors into the server market[1]. The future may very well be ARM hardware instead of x86 -- already netbooks and laptops, etc. are going ARM. Is this an attempt to lock out Linux from the future computing markets if x86 wanes? And what about hybrid cores? Like big.LITTLE or the PS/3 but maybe instead x86 with a dozen ARM coprocessors (or v/v)?