Lenovo UEFI Bug Only Likes Windows and RHEL 162
New submitter Nagilum23 writes "It looks like Lenovo only knows of Windows and RHEL where their Thinkcentre M92p desktop is concerned. While investigating UEFI boot issues, Matthew Garrett found the PC's firmware actually checks the descriptive string for the operating system, and will prevent unlisted operating systems from booting. Garrett writes, 'Every UEFI boot entry has a descriptive string. This is used by the firmware when it's presenting a menu to users - instead of "Hard drive 0" and "USB drive 3", the firmware can list "Windows Boot Manager" and "Fedora Linux". There's no reason at all for the firmware to be parsing these strings. ... there is a function that compares the descriptive string against "Windows Boot Manager" and appears to return an error if it doesn't match. What's stranger is that it also checks for "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and lets that one work as well. ... This is, obviously, bizarre. A vendor appears to have actually written additional code to check whether an OS claims to be Windows before it'll let it boot. Someone then presumably tested booting RHEL on it and discovered that it didn't work. Rather than take out that check, they then addded another check to let RHEL boot as well."
Note that this isn't a SecureBoot issue. Lenovo is aware of the problem and looking into it.
Obviously for internal security (Score:2, Funny)
Lenovo limits your OS choice. Obviously there is a reason...and the likely one is that the OS choices they steer you towards are the ones that have the handy back doors installed for remote monitoring. Isn't that what you would do if you needed to monitor users?
Obviously needs to use a sophisticated system (Score:4, Funny)
As seen here,
http://www.csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html [pace.edu]
This whole issue could have been avoided if the developers didn't use the "Hacker Solution", but instead... well, read the paper.