HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
rhboot
shim-review
OPEN SOURCE2022–2026
rhboot / shim-review

shim-review

Reviews of shim

4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
94GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Reviews of shim

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-07-08 08:47:48 UTC to 2026-07-03 10:58:14 UTC.

0122022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

5 sources
> Can I ask one question? Why not use hibernation at that point? Not GP but hibernation is completely disabled for lockdown kernels[1], which is always enabled when booting under secure boot for kernels trusted by the Microsoft secure boot keys (it is considered a requirement to get you shim signed by rhboot[2] as it is believed that Microsoft considers it a hard requirement, as otherwise you could chain-load a patched version of Windows under secure boot). This doesn't matter for custom kernels but most official distro kernels are built this way to be signed, as otherwise they won't Just Work (TM) on modern laptops. If you disable secure boot then hibernation works again, though I must admit I'm a little surprised how many people seem to disable secure boot. [1]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/kernel_lockdown.7.... [2]: https:
Read the rest
In Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory
> but the way this will be used is by corporations to lock us out into approved Linux distributions. Linux will be effectively owned by RedHat and Microsoft, the signing authority. This is basically true today with Secure Boot on modern hardware (at least in the default configuration -- Microsoft's soft-power policies for device manufacturers actually requires that you can change this on modern machines). This is bad, but it is bad because platform vendors decide which default keys are trusted for secure boot by default and there is no clean automated mechanism to enroll your own keys programmatically (at least, without depending on the Microsoft key -- shim does let you do this programmatically with the MOK). The set of default keys ended up being only Microsoft (some argue this is because of direct pressure from Microsoft, but this woul
Read the rest
d've happened for almost all hardware regardless and is a far more complicated story), but in order to permit people to run other operating systems on modern machines Microsoft signed up to being a CA for every EFI binary in the universe. Red Hat then controls which distro keys are trusted by the shim binary Microsoft signs[1]. This system ended up centralised because the platform vendor (not the device owner) fundamentally controls the default trusted key set and is what caused the whole nightmare of the Microsoft Secure Boot keys and rh-boot signing of shim. Getting into the business of being a CA for every binary in the world is a very bad idea, even if you are purely selfish and don't care about user freedoms (and it even makes Secure Boot less useful of a protection mechanism because it means that machines where users only want to trust Microsoft also necessarily trust Linux and every other EFI binary they sign -- there is no user-controlled segmentation of trust, which is the classic CA/PKI problem). I don't personally know how the Secure Boot / UEFI people at Microsoft feel about this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also dislike the situation we are all in today. Basically none of these issues actually apply to TPMs, which are more akin to limited HSMs where the keys and policies are all fundamentally user-controlled in a programmatic way. It also doesn't apply to what we are building either, but we need to finish building it before I can prove that to you. [1]: https://github.com/rhboot/shim-review
In Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company
Alma used CloudLinux's secure boot key (among other CloudLinux infrastructure / resources) for their first few releases. Rocky Linux didn't have secure boot out the gate because we built everything from scratch, which included going through the long process of getting our own secure boot key approved / signed by Microsoft. See https://github.com/rhboot/shim-review/issues/194 (Alma didn't get their own until https://github.com/rhboot/shim-review/issues/235)
In The future of AlmaLinux
In my opinion, this news is exaggerated. The 3rd party UEFI CA key is implemented by the Shim, which is an attack vector. To be certified by default for the shim, the workflow is a github issue [0]. This is not necessarily bad, but a vector for social-engineering and more. If an attacker is signed by the shim, he can execute trusted code on most machines without problems. IMO it is better to leave this choice to the user to take this risk and enable the shim. Who installs linux should make this choice consciously [0]: https://github.com/rhboot/shim-review
In Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by default

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.