It's Looking Like UEFI SecureBoot Will Be Ready In Time For Debian 10.0 Buster

It looks like that by the time Debian 10.0 "Buster" rolls about in roughly one year, the UEFI SecureBoot support should be in good shape.

While most operating systems -- including other major Linux distributions -- have been offering good UEFI SecureBoot for a while now, it's taken a while for the free software minded Debian to get their ducks in a row. SecureBoot didn't make it in time for Stretch but the support is now coming together, especially following Debian's SecureBoot sprint earlier this year.

At this week's Debian Conference (DebConf18) in Taiwan, some of the Debian UEFI team presented their current work. They have been getting their SecureBoot-enabled kernel in order, GRUB2 signing to work, they are currently shipping an older version of the SB shim, and they have also been tackling fwupd support for being able to enable secure firmware updates during reboots.

In Debian "unstable" right now are a majority of the necessary support changes. Work not yet in place are generating the SecureBoot support for CD releases or live images nor any of the Debian cloud images.

The complete 2018 Debian UEFI SecureBoot presentation can be found embedded below: