[RFC] initoverlayfs - a scalable initial filesystem

[Paul Menzel]

[Sorry for the spam to the people in Cc. Now the real address.]

Dear Luca,


Am 11.12.23 um 22:45 schrieb Luca Boccassi:
> On Mon, 11 Dec 2023 at 21:20, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 08:58:58PM +0000, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>>> On Mon, 11 Dec 2023 at 20:43, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:

>>>> On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 08:15:27PM +0000, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, 11 Dec 2023 at 17:30, Demi Marie Obenour

>>>>>> On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 10:57:58AM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>>>>>>> On Fr, 08.12.23 17:59, Eric Curtin (ecurtin at redhat.com) wrote:

[…]

>>>>> And for ancient, legacy platforms that do not support modern APIs, the
>>>>> old ways will still be there, and can be used. Nobody is going to take
>>>>> away grub and dracut from the internet, if you got some special corner
>>>>> case where you want to use it it will still be there, but the fact
>>>>> that such corner cases exist cannot stop the rest of the ecosystem
>>>>> that is targeted to modern hardware from evolving into something
>>>>> better, more maintainable and more straightforward.
>>>>
>>>> The problem is not that UEFI is not usable in automotive systems.  The
>>>> problem is that U-Boot (or any other UEFI implementation) is an extra
>>>> stage in the boot process, slows things down, and has more attack
>>>> surface.
>>>
>>> Whatever firmware you use will have an attack surface, the interface
>>> it provides - whether legacy bios or uefi-based - is irrelevant for
>>> that. Skipping or reimplementing all the verity, tpm, etc logic also
>>> increases the attack surface, as does adding initrd-only code that is
>>> never tested and exercised outside of that limited context. If you are
>>> running with legacy bios on ancient hardware you also will likely lack
>>> tpm, secure boot, and so on, so it's all moot, any security argument
>>> goes out of the window. If anybody cares about platform security, then
>>> a tpm-capable and secureboot-capable firmware with a modern, usable
>>> interface like uefi, running the same code in initrd and full system,
>>> using dm-verity everywhere, is pretty much the best one can do.
>>
>> Neither Chrome OS devices nor Macs with Apple silicon use UEFI, and both
>> have better platform security than any UEFI-based device on the market I
>> am aware of.
> 
> We are talking about Linux distributions here. If one wants to use
> proprietary systems, sure, there are better things out there, but
> that's off topic.

In what way is ChromeOS more proprietary than the other GNU/Linux 
distributions, that allow to install the Chrome browser?


Kind regards,

Paul