On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 03:53:22PM +0200, Bzzzz wrote: > BTW, sorry to hijack a bit this thread, but what could > be the advantages to use UEFI (I just have Debian on my > laptop and disabled it from ancient posts I read). There was a good talk at this year's LinuxFest Northwest on this topic. It doesn't seem to be videotaped, but the slides are at http://2014.linuxfestnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/slides/uefi_presentation_0.odp and there's some related reading at https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-that-actually-work-then/ There are a few major takeaways. Mostly they're of interest to OS builders. Notably: 1. Traditional PC BIOS has no actual standards to define its behavior, so there's a ton of variety between implementations. UEFI is standardized in such a way as to make life easier for OS developers. 2. Traditional PC BIOS is basically still emulating an early 1980's era IBM PC, and is incredibly limited in its capabilities. (Others have pointed out the ability to boot from large disks as an example of this. The PC partitioning scheme is another example.) 3. Secure boot. This is a bit weird, because nobody but Microsoft is apparently interested in investing the resources into the infrastructure to manage the PKI associated with this. Interestingly, Microsoft is apparently happy to sign code for free operating systems, but most of us don't bother and simply require that our users disable secure boot. Another detail to note is that there's a common misconception that you can disable UEFI. You can't. What you can do is disable secure boot, as mentioned above, and enable a "compatibility mode", where the UEFI firmware emulates a PC BIOS, but it is still UEFI. noah
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