[Discuss] Grub, EFI, Partitioning…

[Rich Pieri]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2024 13:26:45 -0700
Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> When I first poked my head down into EFI I was horrified: A whole
> damn OS down there.  (Why does everything need to be an OS‽‽)

A number, in fact a litany of reasons.

Starting with securing the boot process against attack.

It also brings cross-architecture portability; a hugely superior
partitioning system (GPT) and GUID-based partition IDs, together with
64-bit support allows booting from partitions >2TB; the ability to boot
an OS from ramdisk which has been an enormously useful feature for me;
the ability to multi-boot a system -- especially from SAN LUNs --
without having to play games with all of the respective boot loaders;
and more.

I'm not suggesting that UEFI is better than legacy PC BIOS. I'm just
listing some aspects of UEFI that I have found to be more useful to me
than their legacy counterparts. There are many ways in which UEFI has
failed to deliver such as device driver portability between pre-
execution environment and OS environments, Microsoft abusing secure
boot in a attempt to lock out competition, Lenovo successfully using
UEFI device signing to block third party hardware, and more.

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