toolbox-images VS sbctl

So essentially this seems like another implementation of what toolbox and distrobox is implementing.

https://github.com/containers/toolbox/

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

With the downside of not having the option to select a Linux distro and being locked to the nixpkgs repositories?

You can also do that with rootless containers via Podman. There’s even a convenient wrapper for that workflow made by Red Hat called Toolbox (https://github.com/containers/toolbox)

The main issues I think is that many of these ideas are only really compatible with an immutable OS like Fedora Silverblue and ostree-like systems. It works better where you can cut releases and say "this is the base system" while a rolling release distribution is a moving target where you will be struggling with idiosyncrasies. The mutable part would be /home on a separate partition and any tool usage would be confined into toolbox like containers.

Sounds very similar to https://github.com/containers/toolbox

It implements what https://github.com/containers/toolbox does but in a simplified way using POSIX sh and with broader compatibility.

You can run any command from any distro using containers. I recently discovered toolbox but I haven't had time to try it yet. I still make my own Ubuntu containers when I'm after some command from there.

There are efforts to get specifically Arch integrated and there's this github repo with an image, but I couldn't get sudo support to work with the included script... and yeah, not worth the effort for now.

No, this isn't true nor correct.

Secure Boot and TPM do offer tangible security benefits and is security features you can take ownership of.

Secure Boot allows your own key hierarchy, and TPM allows you to take ownership.

The linked boot disk isn't really proof that Secure Boot is useless. If you don't set a MOKManager password (as you should), and you change the security state of the machine while present at the keyboard. Yes you can boot things.

This is intended to make sure people can actually decide to trust things. And having insecure defaults makes this less useful. Not very surprising.

TPMs could also prevent attacks like this on your machine.

Incidentally I've invested quite a bit of time in making user-friendly Secure Boot tooling as well. https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

No problem! The sbctl package ships with a pretty extensive hook out of the box (https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/blob/master/contrib/pacman/ZZ-sbctl.hook). It's been very reliable for automatically resigning .efi executables after updates for me.

sbctl verify returns failed to find EFI system partition despite it definitely is there. It's the same issue as this but remounting or restarting doesn't fix it.

lol

Must actually prevent unsigned images from booting

sudo dnf install asciidoc golang -y VERSION=0.11 cd /tmp curl -L "https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/releases/download/${VERSION}/sbctl-${VERSION}.tar.gz" | tar zxvf - cd "sbctl-${VERSION}" make sudo make install cd ~

By far the easiest is to use sbctl to generate, install and use keys to sign your efi images. You can use mkinitcpio to build the unified kernels automatically and a pacman trigger to rerun the sbctl signing when the kernel is updated. Pretty straightforward (once you've done it once).

The question is whether you have any UEFI drivers or not. If they're in the ESP you can just look there to check, but UEFI drivers can also be loaded from PCI cards or baked in the firmware itself.

If you're using a TPM for Secure Boot, you can use the command in https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/wiki/FAQ#option-rom to know for sure.