Purpose of addons

Posted Dec 24, 2024 15:16 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
Parent article: Systemd takes steps toward a more secure boot process

> Add-ons are not going to become completely obsolete, however. Their primary use going forward is likely to be providing microcode updates, which usually have a different lifecycle than the kernel.

The main purpose of addons remains the same: to allow the hardware/platform owner to augment a UKI provided by the OS vendor. These two entities in many cases will not be the same, and won't have access to the same signing keys. As a user, you usually don't wnat to have to take care of your own kernel, initrd, etc. As an OS vendor, you don't want to have to provide any hardware-local customization for users, as it just doesn't scale outside of purpose-built and integrated OSes and devices.

The purpose of the multi-profile support in the UKI instead, is for the OS vendor to provide common alternatives (IE: debug mode, recovery mode, etc).