On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 09:52:41AM +0000, Mate Kukri wrote:
Can you clarify:
1. which documentation exactly refers to "GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING"?
2. which debian / grub2 package version "GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING" is
known to work on?
I tried two different search engines and found exactly one reference to
that term anywhere on the internet (which is highly unusual in itself!).
I'm going to break the link slightly because I don't want to give it
more references, but you can remove the "XXX" strings from it if you
want to look:
httpsXXX://www.thelinuxvaultXXX.net/linux-security-hardening/how-to-use-XXXgrub-security-to-harden-your-linux-boot/
The term GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING appears nowhere in GRUB's git history,
neither upstream nor in Debian. I cannot find the term in any upstream
or Debian documentation. The way that the GRUB documentation documents
to disable menu editing is to set a password, as described here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Menu-interface.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/Authentication-and-authorisation.html
I conclude that either the "GRUB_DISABLE_EDITING" option was introduced
by some other distribution, or (much more likely) it is a fiction made
up by a large language model (LLM or "AI"). The web page on
thelinuxvault.net above has other structural features that suggest to me
that it was written by an LLM. It may happen to include things that are
true, probably due to copying from other sources, but in general you
shouldn't trust anything it says.
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [[email protected]]
