Debian 10 "Buster" Working To Have UEFI SecureBoot In Good Shape

Written by Michael Larabel in Debian on 7 January 2019 at 02:16 PM EST. 14 Comments
DEBIAN
While most major Linux distributions have been supporting UEFI SecureBoot for years already in order to work nicely on modern locked-down (generally Windows pre-loaded) PCs, Debian stable releases have yet to properly support SecureBoot but that should be changing with this year's release of 10.0 Buster.

Debian 9 "Stretch" ended up not having Secure Boot support in time while now for the Debian 10.0 release that's beginning its initial soft freeze, UEFI SecureBoot has fortunately been worked out.

Debian Developers up through last year were tackling all the bits for Secure Boot from the kernel changes to GRUB2 boot-loader signing and meeting all the other requirements. Also, Debian developers have been working on Fwupd support for supporting BIOS/firmware upgrades too.

For those currently running Debian Sid, developers are interested in feedback for testing Secure Boot. A call for testing has been issued for hopefully ironing out any lingering issues before it's too late for Debian 10.0.

Testing Secure Boot requires installing their signed shim, the signed GRUB EFI image, and a supported Linux 4.19-based kernel, among other changes for existing users while on Debian 10.0 this should be a streamlined process.
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