Last Tuesday, loads of Linux users—many running packages released as early as this year—started reporting their devices were failing to boot. Instead, they received a cryptic error message that included the phrase: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”
The cause: an update Microsoft issued as part of its monthly patch release. It was intended to close a 2-year-old vulnerability in GRUB, an open source boot loader used to start up many Linux devices. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, made it possible for hackers to bypass secure boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices running Windows or other operating systems don’t load malicious firmware or software during the bootup process. CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.
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The reports indicate that multiple distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Puppy Linux, are all affected. Microsoft has yet to acknowledge the error publicly, explain how it wasn’t detected during testing, or provide technical guidance to those affected. Company representatives didn’t respond to an email seeking answers.
I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?
it was a vulnerability in Grub tho, i understand the Microsoft hate but not to the extant of lying.
I was interested too. It seems Microsoft has released a patch that blacklists vulnerable grub versions from being able to be secure booted even if they are signed properly:
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/en-US/advisory/CVE-2022-2601
The link was at the top of the article.
Maybe this update somehow affects your UEFI firmware, and it installs a list in there?
So, no booting into Windows until this is fixed then? Fine by me. Hell, might actually make me uninstall it completely and free some disk space…
Well… It’s the opposite… People affected by this issue could not boot Linux…
Right, but you have to boot into Windows first to even get the update in the first place…
But if you don’t boot Windows first you’ll not be affected by this issue. So my statement is correct
Oh cool! I’ll need to look into that, thanks! Wonder if there’s a way to convert an existing Windows parition into this somehow, installed software and all, because that would be perfect…
Not that I know of, though imaging a physical Windows install to a VM is very possible. I just kinda like the docker solution because it’s fairly lightweight, but if you want a more robust solution, a VM is the way to go. There’s still limitations on both solutions like gaming not really being a thing unless you get deep in the weeds with things like VFIO and Looking Glass.
Woah, interesting. Is that like a legal option because it looks like it doesn’t ask you to provide an image or whatever? Not that I mind either way, just curious if this is prone to be deleted soon or not.
What’s the upside of having it in a VM?
Edit: nevermind the legality, found a disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
The upside is you can treat it as just another program with a big flat file that serves as it’s hard disk. You can move a VM between computers, they’re universal. Hell you can move it to a data center and hardly notice a difference. You can make a snapshot, try something out, and if it borks, roll it back to a previous snapshot. You can copy the VM any number of times.
Basically it decouples operating systems from hardware so you can treat a computer like software.
Maybe its finally time to get rid of my dual boot. I haven’t used the windows side in like half a year…
And each time you want to use Windows, you have to go through hoops and updates of Windows and then updates of the applications (and possibly games) to just do the work you intended to boot into. I had Windows for a few years in dual mode too and know the problems of a Windows system that is not used often.
If you really need some applications, then consider using a VM (however doesn’t solve the updates and usability issue of Windows). Off course some games won’t work, but if its not a game then maybe you can finally get rid of your dual boot.
At this point, the only thing keeping me back is I have a bunch of files made in Clip Studio Paint that I can’t open in linux, but I think I might be able to run CSP in a VM, if needs be. Not really anything gaming related.
Now just to find time to do it lol
That’s actually not bad, if this is the only thing (hold on, after looking into a bit it could be a show stopper still). An idea is, if its not too many files, would be to save them from this application in a more universal usable format and not use it anymore. But that comes with ton compatibility issues on itself, so who knows.
It seems like WINE (the tool that is used as main part of Proton in Steam) can run Clip Studio Paint, but not great (Silver rating): https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=15102 And then the question is if it will even work well with Wacom devices this way. Also I’m a bit worried if it will work well in a VM too.
I just tried installing this patch tonight on my windows drive - not because I use windows, just to… you know… keep it updated and secure I guess.
It literally won’t even install. It just fails out every time. Whatever. Microsoft releases so many bad patches lately. WTH are they even doing over there? Windows used to be king and they’ve been screwing it up since 8 came out.
Microsoft fired its entire QA team 10 years ago, and shifted the responsibility for testing onto developers. They also got rid of their dedicated hardware lab where software would be tested on many different hardware combinations.
I have worked in two companies that made the same move of firing QA, and in both the quality of the released software took a marked dive. (In neither company did senior management admit that what everyone warned them would be a mistake was a mistake. Instead they blamed developers.)
These days Microsoft’s testing team is whichever users receive each update first. They rely on users and telemetry to do what should be the job of dedicated testers.
Microsoft fired its entire QA team 10 years ago, and shifted the responsibility for testing onto developers. They also got rid of their dedicated hardware lab where software would be tested on many different hardware combinations.
That…makes SO much sense and explains a lot! Thanks for mentioning it.
So glad I recently removed Windows from my former dual boot system completely. Was sick of getting errors during Linux boot up after running Windows for that one piece of software I couldn’t get to work in Wine or Bottles. The culprit I assumed was Windows updates, which I attempted to disable through the registry on several occasions. It would work for a short period and then Microsoft, in all their wisdom, would just reenable updates because clearly they know better than I what I want my system to do. The last time it happened was the final straw for me when I wanted to boot into Windows briefly only to be left waiting half an hour for Windows to apply updates on shutdown. Pissed me off so much I killed the power mid-update, booted up a live partition tool and wiped Windows off my system completely (updating the grub to remove dual boot). That’s when I discovered that not properly shutting down Windows would mark my other drives dirty and make them read only. To fix this I ended up having to insert Windows installation media and pretend like I wanted to reinstall Windows 10 again. Once it got to the stage when it was about to write to the drive I cancelled the installation and rebooted back into Linux. Voilà! Could write to my drives again. To hell with Windows. I’d rather live without that one piece of software and have my system do what I want it to do rather than it second guess me and disregard my instructions. This whole automatic update thing really boiled my piss. At least with Linux I can choose to apply updates when it’s convenient for me to do so.
I have two pieces of software I cannot live without, to the point that I would rewrite them for Linux if it came to that. Running Windows as a VM using Virtual Box has been a nice experience so far. (Given that both software are not CPU nor GPU heavy and could run on a tree if need be.)
I installed windows 11 in kvm based vm and gave it 80GB of space on ssd. I have booted into it abot 5 to 6 times in last year or so. I hate that I have to keep it, but its nice to have when some shitty websites demand that they work only on windows. (I mean wtf, its a f*ing website)
What two pieces of software, if you don’t mind sharing?
I ask because a relative who is a software developer could somehow barely finally leave windows, because of WinSCP, which is, afaik, a GUI for secure copy commands. Why rsync or sftp commands cannot be enough for a software developer without WinSCP was beyond me. But perhaps there is something I don’t know about each of these pieces of software.
BookLibConnect and AaxAudioConverter. I use them do download my Audible purchases. They are both written using WPF (or some other Windows API only GUI lib) and thus cannot be run on Linux. I might rewrite them using the newest C# cross platform library, but that library does not compile native on Linux, only on Windows… (Unless you use the community maintained version).
I did try to find replacement for both for them but their ease of use and the conversion tool for axx to m4b made it preferable to just install Windows in a VM.
As for WinSCP, it is a SFTP/FPT client that is really nice and I did miss it initially as well. But Nautilus file manager has both SFTP and FTP support built into it. And if you want a dedicated client, I can recommend Terminus (but I am not a heavy user, rclone in terminal does most of my heavy lifting).
