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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

I think the topic of Lennart's talks usually is very interesting but his delivery assumes the audience knows much more about the subject than I do, at least. Most other talks I watch I have an easier time to follow.

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The vidoes are mostly a condensed form of the blogposts he's been writing on these topics (filesystem layout / Boot Loader Specification / Secure Boot / Measured Boot / Unified Kernel Images) for a couple of years now, so you can read those if you prefer.

https://0pointer.net/blog/unlocking-luks2-volumes-with-tpm2-...

https://0pointer.net/blog/the-wondrous-world-of-discoverable...

https://0pointer.net/blog/authenticated-boot-and-disk-encryp...

https://0pointer.net/blog/fitting-everything-together.html

https://0pointer.net/blog/brave-new-trusted-boot-world.html

https://0pointer.net/blog/linux-boot-partitions.html

Do you have an example for stuff that the audience is expected to know? Or the other talks that do a better job? What kind of background do you have? Assuming an average full stack dev, of course he addresses a different audience, since this is a talk addressed to Linux OS developers at a conference with the description:

"All Systems Go! is a conference focused on foundational user-space Linux technologies. Its goal is to provide a gathering place for both contributors and users of projects that make up the foundation of modern Linux systems."

So, summing up: maybe you are not part of the target audience?

I think this one is especially worse, because TPM is a piece of hardware and is for security. The combination of the two alienates a lot of software engineers, like >90%. I've never met anyone in real-life who already knew how to use TPM, though many do know what it is and what it's for.

So, it's really a bad (or s**ty) topic to talk about in front of an unsuspecting audience, but certainly there are people who would appreciate the work, especially in embedded/robotics fields (which have been rising slowly for a long time).

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