Since fbwhiptail allows us to customize the background colors, we should
colorize warnings and error messages to provide a user with an
additional subtle cue that there might be a problem. I have added two
additional configuration options:
CONFIG_WARNING_BG_COLOR
CONFIG_ERROR_BG_COLOR
and in the librem13v2.config file you can see an example for how to set
them to be yellow and red gradients, respectively. I've also updated the
main two scripts that use whiptail to include those background colors.
If you decide to use regular whiptail, just don't set these config
options and it should behave as expected.
When a user gets confirmation of their boot menu choice, that's largely
to give them the option of making their boot choice the default. In the
case of "force mode" there's no reason for the user to be presented with
that dialog so this change skips right ahead to the boot once they have
In the event a user does pick the insecure "force" boot option that
bypasses checksum and signing checks in Heads, it would be nice to
provide a clear visual warning during the boot process that they are in
this state. This change will add a kernel argument that changes the boot
console background to be red and removes any boot splash that might
obscure it, in the event the user picks the insecure boot mode.
Since a user should only boot into this mode during emergencies, having
it be apparent that it's an unsafe mode helps ensure the user doesn't
pick this boot option needlessly.
Currently when the boot entries change, kexec-select-boot dies. Given
the normal loop is set up to catch this event and display a regular boot
menu at the next iteration of the loop, instead of dying it would be
better to just warn and then return from that function back into the
main loop. In addition to that I added a GUI menu for the same warning
when in GUI mode.
Part of the Heads workflow involves handling legitimate changes to /boot
as part of the package manager. This is a challenging workflow to handle
as package managers on many systems work in a completely unattended way
(and some even reboot first, apply updates, and then reboot again).
We need to be able to detect changes that are potentially caused by a
package manager so to do that I've set up a trigger within the OS
(currently just for Debian) that runs both before and after package
updates. It verifies the signatures in /boot and if they fail before
package updates it creates a log file in
/boot/kexec_package_trigger_pre.txt. If they fail after package updates
run /boot/kexec_package_trigger_post.txt is created. These files contain
the following fields:
CHANGED_FILES: A list of files in /boot that failed the sha256sum check
UPDATE_INITRAMFS_PACKAGE: An (optional) list of packages known to
trigger initramfs changes
Following those fields is a list of log output from the last package
manager run which contains its own formatted fields (I'm pulling from
/var/lib/dpkg/info).
When a user selects a boot option, gui-init first verifies the
checksums just to catch errors before calling kexec-select-boot. If
there are any errors it looks for these package logs and if they exist,
it displays appropriate warnings. If the files are absent it displays a
more generic warning. The user is also given an opportunity to re-sign
the /boot hashes.
There was a bug in the "force" boot mode where it would still fail if
signatures didn't match. This was because the check_config function
validates the signatures for kexec files. I've added a few conditionals
here so that in the case of a forced boot mode, we can bypass those
signature checks that would prevent boot and error out to a recovery
console.
The number of options we want in the menu is starting to get large
enough that it's worth slimming things down in the main menu and move
options to nested menus. Along with this nested menu change is the
option to re-sign and re-hash files in /boot directly from the menu.
One of the other core functions a user needs when bootstrapping is
taking over the TPM. I've added a new option in the menu for this and it
revealed that some of the menus needed more space so I've widened all
the menus and also made the main menu longer so the options don't
scroll.
The point of this change is to provide a failsafe (failunsafe?) mode for
less technically-savvy users who will ultimately be using Heads by
default on Librem laptops.
There are some scenarios where an end user might forget to update hashes
in /boot after an initrd change or might have some other hash mismatch.
Currently that user would then be stuck in a recovery console in Heads
not knowing what to do within that limited shell environment to fix the
situation.
This change adds a 'force' mode to kexec-select-boot that goes straight
into a boot menu and bypasses the hash checks so the user could more
easily get back into their system to attempt to repair it. It adds
appropriate warnings about why this is a risky option and moves it down
toward the bottom of the menu. The goal would be to just have this be an
emergency option our support could guide a user to if they ended up in
this situation.
Guarded linuxboot specific init entries
Removed Makefile entries into separate file (conflicts with srcing /etc/config)
Added CONFIG_BOOT_LOCAL/_REMOTE to control interface setup
Fixed CONFIG_TPM usage
if "CONFIG_TPM=y" is not present in the config file, functionalities
needing TPM could be disabled, while leaving other functionalities intact.
This will make Heads a more general-usage bootloader payload atop coreboot.
In particular I added a GUI menu to instruct the user if there is no
TOTP code registered (as is the case upon first flash) and also added
better handling of the case the user selects 'default boot' when there
is no default boot set yet. Apart from that where there were text-only
menus left in gui-init I've replaced them with GUI menus.
When selecting the boot menu option (m) in the gui-init you call out to
kexec-select-boot. To better maintain the graphical menu experience,
I've added a -g option to kexec-select-boot that, when set, will use a
graphical whiptail menu for the most common menu selection modes.
This is a modified version of the generic-init script that uses whiptail
to generate a graphical menu. I changed two of the options so that the
user can refresh the menu to get an updated TOTP code if needed.
USB smart card readers are most full speed devices, and there is no
"rate-matching hubs" beneath the root hub on older (e.g. GM45) plat-
forms, which has companion OHCI or UHCI controllers and needs cor-
responding drivers to communicate with card readers directly plugged
into the motherboard, otherwise a discrete USB hub should be inserted
between the motherboard and the reader.
This time I make inserting linux modules for OHCI and UHCI controllable
with option CONFIG_LINUX_USB_COMPANION_CONTROLLER.
A linux config for x200 is added as an example.
Tested on my x200s and elitebook revolve 810g1.
if "CONFIG_TPM=y" is not present in the config file, functionalities
needing TPM could be disabled, while leaving other functionalities intact.
This will make Heads a more general-usage bootloader payload atop coreboot.
