[coreboot] Permanent solution of the UEFI Secure Boot problem?!

[ron minnich]

Get a chromebook. It runs coreboot. You can rebulid and reflash the
bios. It has a secure boot you can turn on and off. It's a state of
the art machine with excellent build quality. I replaced my Mac Air
with a samsung xe550, I put in it normal mode and run Linux in a
chroot and it's great. All my coreboot, Plan 9, and Go work is done on
this chromebook. It runs my personal build of coreboot.

or,
Get tbe GETAC laptops that use coreboot. They're even more open than
the chromebook -- there's no binary blob. They're heavy and have poor
battery life but they're pretty open.

or,
Get an older thinkpad that uses coreboot.

or,
find a laptop that mostly uses coreboot supported chipsets. Spend a
year trying to get all the proprietary bits working (EC for example).
You will learn a lot.

or,
get an ARM-based laptop and help us with the ongoing ARM port of
coreboot. A samsung ARM chromebook or EFIKA might be nice.

One of the things that people don't always realize is that hardware
design is really, really hard -- far harder than it was 10 years ago.
It's pretty easy to put together a board that boots most of the time.
But add in the effort to make a real laptop that people want to use,
with packaging and cooling and emissions and wifi and pointer device
and so on, and then taking that through regulatory hurdles and all the
other bits, well, that's another problem entirely. Peter's estimate is
quite good.

So get one of the laptops that coreboot supports and start there.
Unless you're at a company that does design routinely it's going to be
almost impossible to get something done in a timely manner, and, when
you're done, it's unlikely anyone will care.

I talked to Mark years ago about the laptop issue, but I ended up
concluding that ubuntu was not going to be able to contribute a lot to
the effort.

ron