[Arm-netbook] Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices

[Gordan Bobic]

On 01/15/2012 05:13 PM, lkcl luke wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2012 at 4:19 PM, Gordan Bobic<gordan at bobich.net>  wrote:
>
>>>    however on the early toshiba ac100s somehow the key has been obtained
>>> (i don't know the details) so you can actually do something.
>>
>> Can you provide any evidence for this? I've been using AC100s since the
>> first reports of Linux working on them (a couple of months after they
>> hit the shelves, and I have never heard of any such protection.
>
>
>>>    but for the newer ac100s, you're f*****d.
>>
>> Absolutely not true.
>
>   ok, so i may have got things wrong.
>
>   vital question: can you replace u-boot on the ac100?  if so, on which models?

uboot is not supported. Some work has been done on getting it to work, 
but it doesn't support the display and nvec (keyboard/mouse) on the 
AC100 at the moment, so it's pretty useless.

The bootloader is aboot, and it is not open source. You have to wrap up 
the kernel + initrd + headers/options into an "image" that you flash to 
the boot or recovery partitions. Check the AC100 wiki:

http://tosh-ac100.wetpaint.com/

>   if that's not early enough, can you replace the *entire* bootloader
> on the ac100, right back to the absolute bare metal, as if you had a
> brand new CPU?

I don't know, never looked into it. You may want to join the AC100 
mailing list on launchpad and #ac100 on freenode - there may be somebody 
who knows there.

Gordan