Implementing secure boot support

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Will Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 be the only release to support secure boot? Or will support also come in a future update in release 6?

bl
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R. Hinton's picture Guru 6827 points
4 March 2014 5:29 AM

Jonathan,

Check this Red Hat solution id 634133. I'm curious how it works out for you.

bl Active Contributor 147 points
9 March 2014 5:12 PM

Thank you. My question is about RHEL 6, not RHEL 7.

R. Hinton's picture Guru 6827 points
9 March 2014 7:50 PM

Hi Jonathan, apologies I missed that.

See this link at Red Hat that describes the challenges non-M.S. operating systems faced with the advent of Secure Boot. Linux Torvalds had rough things to say of this implementation and how it was poorly enacted (I suspect) for all operating systems.

There is a link within that article by Red Hat that goes to a technical blog by Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett showing they first attempted to implement this into Fedora, and now that's probably why it seems it's first enterprise appearance is with RHEL 7.

I searched some more and could not find any discussion of Secure Boot in RHEL 6. This article at Linuxinsider.com may cause one to suffer from ennui but has some relevant background.

If Secure Boot does exist for RHEL 6 (I doubt it does, and I'd be surprised), hopefully someone else can post about it here or someplace.

bl Active Contributor 147 points
10 March 2014 2:09 AM

That LinuxInsider article was especially interesting. When buying a new desktop with Windows 8.1 preinstalled and hoping to install RHEL, I have wondered if a ThinkCentre would work okay or if I need to stick with Dell.

R. Hinton's picture Guru 6827 points
10 March 2014 3:09 AM

Jonathan, I've had good luck with Dells using Linux in a lot of cases with laptops.

Have you ever looked at the small niche company system76.com that deals exclusively with Linux laptops? I bought one for a client who needed Linux compatibility with extra storage and configured it with their RHEL license with no issues at all of any kind (it comes with Ubuntu, I very easy reloaded it with RHEL). A coworker has been using system76 for a while and gives demonstrations of them at the annual Linux User's Group that meets in a major city near here. I'm thinking of buying one too.

That being said, for Linux compatibility in general, look at Ubuntu's website where they show (a lot but not all) specific system compatibility with Linux. That generally helps with other Linux derivatives. My client loves his system76 laptop, and some have amazing amounts of storage with 4th gen i7 procs, and 16gb ram.

R. Hinton's picture Guru 6827 points
9 March 2014 7:37 PM

Maybe and hopefully Secure Boot might appear in a later minor release of RHEL 6 (I'd be surprised if it did)

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