[Discuss] Grub, EFI, Partitioning…

[Steve Litt]

Rich Pieri said on Tue, 3 Sep 2024 16:53:05 -0400

>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; 

I'm not sure in what way it does this, but I'm sure it could have been
done in a much simpler way.

>a hugely superior
>partitioning system (GPT) 

You don't need UEFI for GPT partitioning, as long as your boot drive is
MBR, and given how cheap little NVMes are these days, it's practical to
have a little boot drive and a big spinning rust formatted GPT for bind
mounts.

>and GUID-based partition IDs, together with
>64-bit support allows booting from partitions >2TB; 

Which isn't as important now that small NVMe drives are so darn cheap.

>the ability to boot
>an OS from ramdisk which has been an enormously useful feature for me;

Haven't we been doing this since Knoppix came out? Or am I
misunderstanding you?

>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.

Yeah, chain loading was never fun. But these days multi-boot isn't as
essential because we have VMs.

>
>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.

I didn't know about Lenovo going John Deere on us. That's disgusting.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com