this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Been down the rabbit hole lately of UEFI Secure Boot issues, and decided to write an overview of how it works out-of-the-box in the excellent Debian-based Linux Mint LMDE 6.

Have mostly been researching this stuff as I was looking to replace GRUB entirely with systemd-boot on one of my systems. Will likely write a follow-up piece documenting that journey if I think it'd be interesting to some nerds out there.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Perhaps I missed it when skimming the article, but why were you looking to replace GRUB?

In case it was in the article, it might be worth adding that information up here.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Good question! There's a few reasons, I guess:

  • There's a large element of "because I can" to this, just to explore how stupid the scope of systemd is as a suite.
  • There's a small practical element. GRUB itself is quite a hefty tool to accommodate all kinds of boot setups, and it works well. If you have a simple boot setup though you could probably shave a couple of seconds off of the boot time just by using the simplified sd-boot and loading the kernel via its EFIStub.
  • A learning exercise in self-signing EFI binaries, enrolling a MOK (if I use Shim), and setting up scripts to handle updates.

All boils down to my enjoyment of doing weird nerdy things though, ultimately. =)

[–] cdombroski 1 points 1 year ago

Using systemd-boot with the shim is definitely doable, you just have to name the systemd-boot loader as grubx64.efi in the EFI/BOOT directory. After that, you just need to sign any dkms modules with a key imported into MOK and register the hash of systemd-boot with MOK

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