Register Log in  Technology Lab / Information Technology
Windows 8′s locked bootloaders: much ado about nothing, or the
end of the world as we know it?  Microsoft's secure boot policy
for Windows 8 has some Linux advocates up in …   The concerns
revolve around the use of a new feature called UEFI Secure Boot.
All Windows 8 systems that meet Microsoft's certification
requirements must use UEFI firmware with Secure Boot enabled.
UEFI: a BIOS fit for the 21st century  Unified Extensible
Firmware Interface is a relatively modern replacement for the
ancient PC BIOS; it handles basic tasks such as initializing the
machine, probing its hardware, and passing control to an
operating system. Unlike the BIOS, which was intimately coupled
to the vagaries of x86 processors and tended to be both slow and
difficult to extend, UEFI is designed to be a processor-
independent, modular, extensible system capable of much faster
boot-ups.  UEFI's predecessor, EFI, was developed for x86 and
Itanium systems by Hewlett-Packard and