SUSE's enterprise server distribution has today (July 8 in the US) become the first enterprise server distribution to incorporate support for secure boot.
It is one of several new features in the third service pack for SLES 11. The original release of SLES 11 was made in 2009.
Secure boot is one of the features available in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or UEFI, the replacement for the BIOS on motherboards. It was implemented in Windows 8 which was released in October last year.
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Some GNU/Linux distributions have developed their own methods of booting on such hardware. However, installing such distributions on the same disk alongside Windows 8 is still not an easy task for the average user.
But thus far, secure boot has been seen only as an issue for desktop users, never in the server room.
SUSE has closer ties to Microsoft than other GNU/Linux companies. It signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft back in 2006, and renewed the deal when it fell due.
So is there something about the spread of secure boot to servers as a compulsory feature that it knows something about?
Matthias Eckerman, a senior product manager at SUSE, has been quoted by the website ServerWatch as saying that market analysis shows that secure boot may be deployed and even required on servers "going forward".
Secure boot support was implemented in SUSE's community distribution, openSUSE, in its last release and features from this distribution often make their way into the enterprise distribution.
Given Windows 8 desktop take-up by businesss that can only be described as a disaster, one would have thought that Microsoft would think twice about making lockout mechanisms such as secure boot compulsory for its server range.
But then Microsoft has not always been known to make sane decisions, especially under the stewardship of Steve Ballmer.
