Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Mar 27, 2013 19:11 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411)
In reply to: Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot by mjg59
Parent article: Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

> So, yes, the absence of any machines that fail to live up to these expectations is meaningful. The vendors have already had the opportunity to screw this up and haven't done so yet. There's no reason to believe that they're going to get worse at it.

That's a rather bold assertion. I haven't got any examples of machines that screw it up, but that's partly because (at this point) I haven't had to test any. Have you tested them all? They're all bug free? And that somehow implies all future products will be bug-free as well?

There have been bugs in BIOS implementations. There have been bugs in APM implementations. There have been bugs in ACPI tables. There have been bugs in IRQ routing. There have been bugs in shipping CPUs. I remember a motherboard (ASUS, IIRC, with a 200MHz Pentium MMX in it) at one place I worked that burned (literally -- the magic smoke got out) through 3 sets of L2 cache before we realized it was probably only ever tested with win95, and a 32bit OS that actually ran the hardware full tilt ran it too hot.

There *will* be bugs in these systems, and some of them *will* slip by QA and Microsoft's certification process even if everyone involved is being both diligent and fair.

Bugs happen. They *always* happen, in software, in microcode, in firmware and in hardware. The only question is whether the incentives are in place to convince the manufacturer to fix the problems when they arise.

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Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Mar 27, 2013 19:16 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Every machine I've tested (which is a number) is bug free in this respect. Can we guarantee that a given machine will not have any bugs that prevent users from being able to use it as they want to? No, but that's already true. What's different in this case is that there's a clear and absolute argument that a machine with this bug is defective and misleadingly advertised, which isn't true for many other bugs that would prevent you from running Linux.

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Mar 27, 2013 19:21 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Certification processes are usually troublesome and expensive. Inevitably companies will ship their shit software/firmware on their shit hardware and it will cause problems. When those problems are identified and they do nothing to try to fix it for you or work around then they risk losing those certifications, which can be extremely expensive for the company in question. So while we can expect issues to happen, it's also reasonable to expect that for the most part issues will be resolved when they crop up.

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Mar 27, 2013 23:26 UTC (Wed) by s0f4r (guest, #52284) [Link] (1 responses)

There *will* be bugs in these systems, and some of them *will* slip by QA and Microsoft's certification process even if everyone involved is being both diligent and fair. Bugs happen. They *always* happen, in software, in microcode, in firmware and in hardware. The only question is whether the incentives are in place to convince the manufacturer to fix the problems when they arise. Microsofts certification is extremely rigorous, and the second line is already answered: vendors would not get certified, which means they lose the right to display logos and so on, which is IMHO a huge incentive - that is actually what the hardware vendors want - the "sticker". I do not doubt that Microsoft will take any vendor to court if it is caught illegally displaying the logo.

Garrett: Secure Boot and Restricted Boot

Posted Mar 27, 2013 23:56 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

> Microsofts certification is extremely rigorous, and the second line is already answered: vendors would not get certified, which means they lose the right to display logos and so on, which is IMHO a huge incentive - that is actually what the hardware vendors want - the "sticker". I do not doubt that Microsoft will take any vendor to court if it is caught illegally displaying the logo.

Right. Which is why WHQL and "Microsoft Hardware" are bywords for quality.

Google "RROD".