Max-P

Oh no, what a terrible thing to believe in live and let live and minding our own business. How dare we suggest we should treat everyone as equals and keep the government out of people’s private lives. The horror.

Aside from the other answers, no you can’t offload computations to memory. Memory stores data, it doesn’t compute.

The only way having more memory can possibly improve performance, is by having a cached copy of files so they don’t have to be fetched from disk, and applications potentially caching the results of heavy but reusable computations. (Unless you run out of memory and starts spilling over to disk, then more memory will make it fast again by avoiding swapping).

I mean I guess technically yes you could transcode into H264 into a tmpfs mount, and then play the H264, but you’re still not doing it faster and certainly not fast enough to watch in real time, you’re just decoding the AV1 well in advance before actually watching it.

Nope. Even Qualcomm themselves provide what’s needed to run Linux on the Windows for ARM PCs.

The only one I can’t find for sure is whether there’s any lockdown on the firmware for the Microsoft Surface and Copilot+ laptops, but I’m also not finding any sources pointing that it would be. But at this point you’re buying Microsoft hardware, what do you expect.

It has nothing to do with ACPI whatsoever. And firmwares this broken are the exception not the rule.

That’s bullshit. ARM is an architecture and by itself does not specify secure boot any more than x86 does. Raspberry Pis don’t have secure boot. You can unlock the bootloader on a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and relock the bootloader just fine. Several other manufacturers allow bootloader unlocks no problem. The main reason you can’t on some popular phones is US carriers, even international Samsungs you can unlock the bootloader and flash whatever you want on it.

I’m literally typing this comment on a phone running a custom OS (LineageOS on a OnePlus 8T). I’m literally 2 versions of Android ahead of the latest supported version. I also have a Galaxy S7 running Android 15, a phone that officially tops out at Android 8 and launched with Android 6. Both you literally just toggle the bootloader unlock option in the settings, no hacks no craziness, it’s literally a feature.

At this point you’re just straight up making shit up.

That’s the whole point of enrolling your own keys in the firmware. You can even wipe the Microsoft keys if you want. You do that from the firmware setup, or within any OS while secure boot is off (such as sbctl on Linux).

That’s a feature that is explicitly part of the spec. The expectation is you password protect the BIOS to make sure unauthorized users can’t just wipe your keys. But also most importantly that’s all measured by the TPM so the OS knows the boot chain is bad and can bail, and the TPM also won’t unwrap BitLocker/LUKS keys either.

Secure boot is to prevent unauthorized tampering of the boot chain. It doesn’t enforce that the computer will only ever boot Microsoft-approved software, that’s a massive liability for an antitrust lawsuit.

As commenters on the LWN thread said, I doubt that many firmwares even bother to check anyway. My motherboard happens to have had a bug where you can corrupt the RTC and end up in 2031 if you overclock it wrong. I didn’t use secure boot then though so I don’t know if it would have still booted Windows. But I imagine it would.

That said, I’ve always just enrolled my own keys. I know some other distros that make you enroll their keys as well like Bazzite. At least that way you don’t depend on Microsoft’s keys and shim or anything, clean proper secure boot straight into UKI.