Red Hat Security Update Renders Systems Unbootable

'A recently released Red Hat update for the BootHole Vulnerability (firehose link) is causing systems to become unbootable. It is widely reported that updates to the shim, grub2 and kernel packages in RHEL and CentOS 7 and 8 are leaving various systems that use secure boot unbootable. Current recommendations are to avoid updating your system until the issue is resolved, or at least avoid updating the shim, grub2 and kernel packages. Update, shared by PAjamian: Red Hat is now recommending that users do not apply grub2, fwupd, fwupdate or shim updates until new packages are available.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/31/158212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Sun, 2 Aug 2020 08:36:20 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'Current recommendations are to avoid updating your system until the issue is resolved, or at least avoid updating the shim, grub2 and kernel packages.
Update, shared by PAjamian: Red Hat is now recommending that users do not apply grub2, fwupd, fwupdate or shim updates until new packages are available.'
Seems like this whole “secure boot” business is more trouble than it’s worth.

Agreed here too. Back in the day, I could move a hard drive to a new machine, power it on, and it would just start up normal. Now, secure boot firmware is starting to make this insanely difficult. After my old laptop died, I tried moving the old hard disk to a newer laptop (an HP ProBook). After 3 hours struggling and tinkering, not just with me, but also 2 other software engineer colleagues in the room, nothing we tried could get the newer laptop to boot off the old one's disk. In the end, I had to dd my old hard disk's ext4 partition to the existing hard disk on the new laptop, resize it, then run a grub repair. Cheers David On 2/08/20 4:20 pm, john wrote:
Agreed!!!
On 2/08/20 12:09 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
Seems like this whole “secure boot” business is more trouble than it’s worth.
participants (5)
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Bryan Baldwin
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David McNab
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john
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann