Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Kernel tinification: shrinking the kernel and avoiding size regressions

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Fri, 2014-05-02 at 17:19 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 04:41:41PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> >
> >  > And I think we can also further break this down into the classes of
> >  > code which require root privs (i.e., like kexec), and those which can
> >  > be used by any userid.
> >
> > In the brave new world of secure boot, we kind of have to care about
> > even the root cases now too [*], but I agree in the general case.
> 
> Speaking of that... is it worth my time to propose a "What to do about
> the secure_modules/trusted_kernel/whatever patch set that distros are
> carrying to support Secure Boot?  I thought we had agreement and a
> path forward at LPC last year, but things seem to have gotten derailed
> again.

Would you believe we're just discussing with the distros how we might
re-engineer the Linux secure boot process.  Unfortunately the details
depend on a UEFI forum proposal that are UEFI confidential at this time,
but you can probably pick them up from Peter Jones, since you're a Red
Hat employee.  One of the side effects of this, if it happens, will be
to separate Linux secure boot policy from Microsoft's binary signing
requirements which might take some of the heat out of the arguments
about which parts of the patch are to please microsoft and refocus the
debate towards how we make better use of secure boot.  I'll try and
ensure that either the proposals are public by KS or that we have
permission to share the details.

James