Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

Hi, Chris here, CEO @ Amutable. We are very excited about this. Happy to answer questions.

The immediate concern seeing this is will the maintainer of systemd use their position to push this on everyone through it like every other extended feature of systemd?

Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't go the usual path of a minimal support, optional support and then being virtually mandatory by means of tight coupling with other subsystems.

Remote attestation is another technology that is not inherently restrictive of software freedom. But here are some examples of technologies that have already restricted freedom due to oligopoly combined with network effects:

* smartphone device integrity checks (SafetyNet / Play Integrity / Apple DeviceCheck)

* HDMI/HDCP

* streaming DRM (Widevine / FairPlay)

* Secure Boot (vendor-keyed deployments)

* printers w/ signed/chipped cartridges (consumables auth)

* proprietary file formats + network effects (office docs, messaging)

Exciting!

It sounds like you want to achieve system transparency, but I don't see any clear mention of reproducible builds or transparency logs anywhere.

I have followed systemd's efforts into Secure Boot and TPM use with great interest. It has become increasingly clear that you are heading in a very similar direction to these projects:

- Hal Finney's transparent server

- Keylime

- System Transparency

- Project Oak

- Apple Private Cloud Compute

- Moxie's Confer.to

I still remember Jason introducing me to Lennart at FOSDEM in 2020, and we had a short conversation about System Transparency.

I'd love to meet up at FOSDEM. Email me at [email protected].

Edit: Here we are six years later, and I'm pretty sure we'll eventually replace a lot of things we built with things that the systemd community has now built. On a related note, I think you should consider using Sigsum as your transparency log. :)

Edit2: For anyone interested, here's a recent lightning talk I did that explains the concept that all project above are striving towards, and likely Amutable as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0gxBWwwQE

>Amutable is based out of Berlin, Germany.

Probably obvious from the surnames but this is the first time I've seen a EU company pop up on Hacker News that could be mistaken for a Californian company. Nice to see that ambition.

I understand systemd is controversial, that can be debated endlessly but the executive team and engineering team look very competitive. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

My only experience with Linux secure boot so far.... I wasn't even aware that it was secure booted. And I needed to run something (I think it was the Displaylink driver) that needs to jam itself into the kernel. And the convoluted process to do it failed (it's packaged for Ubuntu but I was installing it on a slightly outdated Fedora system).

What, this part is only needed for secure boot? I'm not sec... oh. So go back to the UEFI settings, turn secure boot off, problem solved. I usually also turn off SELinux right after install.

So I'm an old greybeard who likes to have full control. Less secure. But at least I get the choice. Hopefully I continue to do so. The notion of not being able to access online banking services or other things that require account login, without running on a "fully attested" system does worry me.

Lennart will be involved with at least three events at FOSDEM on the coming weekend. The talks seem unrelated at first glance but maybe there will be an opportunity to learn more about his new endeavor.

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/

systemd solved/improved a bunch of things for linux, but now the plan seems to be to replace package management with image based whole dist a/b swaps. and to have signed unified kernel images.

this basically will remove or significantly encumber user control over their system, such that any modification will make you loose your "signed" status and ... boom! goodbye accessing the internet without an id

pottering recently works for Microsoft, they want to turn linux into an appliance just like windows, no longer a general purpose os. the transition is still far from over on windows, but look at android and how the google play services dependency/choke-hold is

im sure ill get many down votes, but despite some hyperbole this is the trajectory

Good thing, without the power coming from RedHat money, the capacity of ruining the Linux ecosystem will finally be reduced!

What will they be reinventing from scratch for no reason?

No. Esp with LP’s track record in systemd.

See: “it’s just an init system”where it’s now also a resolver, log system, etc.

I can buy good intentions, but this opens up too much possibility for not-so-good-intended consequences. Deliberate or emergent.

The first steps look similar to secure boot with TPM.

Can someone smarter than myself describe immutability versus atomicity in regards to current operating systems on the market?

So I imagine Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft.

Looking forward to never using any of this, quite frankly; and hoping it remains optional for the kernel.

If there’s a path to profitability, great for them, and for me too; because it means it won’t be available at no charge.

So LP is or has left Microsoft ?

>We are building cryptographically verifiable integrity into Linux systems

I wonder what that means ? It could be a good thing, but I tend to think it could be a privacy nightmare depending on who controls the keys.

Are there VCs who participated in funding this or are you self funded?

The typical HN rage-posting about DRM aside, there's no reason that remote attestation can't be used in the opposite direction: to assert that a server is running only the exact code stack it claims to be, avoiding backdoors. This can even be used with fully open-source software, creating an opportunity for OSS cloud-hosted services which can guarantee that the OSS and the build running on the server match. This is a really cool opportunity for privacy advocates if leveraged correctly - the idea could be used to build something like Apple's Private Cloud Compute but even more open.

Thank you Lennart, I hope you will be now sufficiently busy to not contribute anything into Linux anymore