[Libosinfo] [v3 3/5] installer: API to query device driver signing requirement

Christophe Fergeau cfergeau at redhat.com
Thu Feb 21 09:44:43 UTC 2013


On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 02:15:45AM +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 5:34 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
> <zeeshanak at gnome.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Christophe Fergeau <cfergeau at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 04:54:09AM +0200, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> >>> From: "Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak at gnome.org>
> >>>
> >>> Some OS vendors recommend or require device drivers to be signed by them
> >>> before these device drivers could be installed on their OS. This
> >>> recommendation/requirement then also applies to the installer scripts of
> >>> that particular OS.
> >>
> >> Do we need to expose this to osinfo users as you added a magic workaround
> >> for the signing requirement ?
> >
> > I think we'll need this for win7 if we don't manage to find a similar
> > magic for it. Lets have the API in place already for that.
> 
> Thinking more about this and the driver format API, I realized that
> unlike driver format API not having this already in place could break
> things for apps later. E.g Right now Boxes installs every postinstall
> driver we list under the OS, provided any of its scripts support
> postinstall drivers. So if/when we add handling of postinstall drivers
> in an install script that can't handle unsigned drivers, Boxes will
> install these unsigned drivers. While in case of incompatible formats,
> drivers simply get ignored, unattended install will break in this
> case.
> 
> So I suggest we add these signature related APIs so that apps
> (currently only Boxes afaik) can already use it to setup proper checks
> in place.

We are not making forward compatibility guarantees, so new additions to
libosinfo may indeed require changes in applications. What we (are trying
to) guarantee is that we won't break things that are working today in newer
libosinfo versions. 0.2.4 was also released with these issues...

Let's first see if it's possible to get unsigned drivers to install on
Win7/Win8, if not there will be a good reason to add these ;)

Christophe
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