The creator of systemd (Lennart Poettering) has recently created a new company dedicated to bringing hardware attestation to open source software.
What might this entail? A previous blog post could provide some clues:
So, let’s see how I would build a desktop OS. The trust chain matters, from the boot loader all the way to the apps. This means all code that is run must be cryptographically validated before it is run. This is in fact where big distributions currently fail pretty badly. This is a fault of current Linux distributions though, not of SecureBoot in general.
If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.
There are lots of others who are equally concerned about this possibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Can’t wait to not be able to VR game with my Nvidia GPU on Linux cuz they can’t be arsed to properly sign their damn proprietary drivers.
Nvidia can’t meaningfully sign their Linux drivers. A distribution can, in theory, include Nvidia drivers in their build and sign it, but the logistics of out of tree drivers is just impossible.
Redhat toys with the concept of a whitelisted ABI for some limited range of kernels, but I’ve never seen a driver actually roll with that.
Basically Linux would need to embrace some form of ABI, and there’s been zero interest in doing so.