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A comment on Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by default. Parent comment

Re:Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by def... by grishka on Friday July 08, 2022 @05:39AM (#32024864)
Haven't been following PCs for a while, is this now something that an OS can do? I've always assumed that boot order is a BIOS setting that's only accessible from the BIOS setup text mode thing.
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Re:Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by def... by nicce on Friday July 08, 2022 @05:47AM (#32024921)
Windows modifies UEFI settings on runtime. There is an API for that. Even setting password for BIOS/UEFI won’t prevent that as machine has been booted already.

For example :

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sysinfo/acces...

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_26968097.html

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_Extensible_Firmware...

There is also NtSetBootEntryOrder() in Windows ntddl

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Re:Lenovo shipping new laptops that only boot Windows by def... by cesarb on Friday July 08, 2022 @05:22PM (#32027313)
Yes, under EFI the OS can set the boot order; you can do it yourself with the "efibootmgr" command on Linux. This is used for instance by fwupd to install firmware updates (it temporarily changes the boot order to boot into a firmware update loader).
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