Board member Bottomley admitted that this approach provides no security protections.

"The current pre-bootloader .... provides no security enhancements over booting Linux with UEFI secure boot turned off," Bottomley wrote . "Its sole purpose is to allow Linux to continue to boot on platforms that come by default with secure boot enabled."

This approach is only a stopgap measure, Bottomley admitted. The foundation is still encouraging the major Linux distributions to develop approaches that take full advantage of UEFI to secure a machine.

Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett, who has followed the issue closely on behalf of Red Hat and Fedora, discounted the Linux Foundation approach, stating that it is "" than the shim approach because it "will boot untrusted images as long as a physically present end-user hits a key on every boot."

The Linux Foundation approach "requires manual intervention at some level, and requires you to know what you are doing, which is perfectly fine for a Linux kernel developer," SUSE's Pfeifer said. In contrast, SUSE's shim approach "will be much more transparent unless you want to dive into it." The SUSE kernel will be signed, so it can take full advantage of the UEFI.