I have pretty much given up on the prospect of running a full fledged FOSS OS on devices that don’t give access to the bootloader’s root of trust, or give you a userland that works with a kernel you can’t control (eg Crouton). It all sounds great until you start trying to do actuall work. As soon as you need anything that’s not provided by the manufacturer software image you start to notice all the foundational things you’re not allowed to do with your system.
Need a kernel option or module not provided? Nope, can’t build/sign it. Remember, not all modules are for new hardware (no VMs for you!). Current version of OS? Distro security updates for kernel? Um maybe if they get around to it lol.
It kind of reminds me of Doctorow’s thing about war on general purpose computing.* Like how is it in the interest of handset manufacturers to let you have a general purpose computer that could run unsigned (by them) code?
To have a real linux distro, you would have to be able to run unsigned privileged code, but that would make it possible to do all sorts of naughty things like unauthorized disk encryption, subverting DRM, mucking around with the radios, etc. You can’t really have have one without the other.
* http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
Need a kernel option or module not provided? Nope, can’t build/sign it. Remember, not all modules are for new hardware (no VMs for you!). Current version of OS? Distro security updates for kernel? Um maybe if they get around to it lol.
It kind of reminds me of Doctorow’s thing about war on general purpose computing.* Like how is it in the interest of handset manufacturers to let you have a general purpose computer that could run unsigned (by them) code?
To have a real linux distro, you would have to be able to run unsigned privileged code, but that would make it possible to do all sorts of naughty things like unauthorized disk encryption, subverting DRM, mucking around with the radios, etc. You can’t really have have one without the other.
* http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...