Re: UEFI/"BIOS" booting

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Wed 16 May 2018 at 00:23:43 (+0200), Pascal Hambourg wrote:
> Le 15/05/2018 à 03:37, David Wright a écrit :
> >
> >>But GRUB is not the only available bootloader.
> >
> >No.
> >
> >It's difficult to divine which bootloaders the author is familiar with.
> >My own experience of the last twenty years is limited to Lilo and Grub.
> 
> Same here. I would not trust LILO any more now because it uses
> hardcoded blocklists to read files, just like GRUB does when
> embedding is not possible, which is considered unreliable.
> 
> >I remember reading about coreboot some years ago, but I doubt I'm ever
> >going to meet it. Are you suggesting others?
> 
> AFAIK, Coreboot is a replacement for platform firmware (BIOS),

Yes, that interested me because at the time I had a lot of
(unpowerful) PCs dotted around, some relatively inaccessible.
One of the attractions of coreboot was not having to sit in
front of each machine editing CMOS screens. But AIUI it was
designed for farms of the sort of PCs that were out of my league.

> not an installable boot loader.

I read somewhere that it could directly load linux instead of,
say, Grub, but I don't know anything about the technicalities.

> I have never used it, but it seems that syslinux supports GPT and EFI.

I haven't knowingly used that since I had PCs that booted into
DOS first, back in the last millennium.

> Also I have read positive reports about rEFInd for EFI boot.

One for the future, when I get my very own machine that's UEFI. At
the moment my newest PCs are a 2008 BIOS laptop and a couple of 2006
desktops. The latter boot GPT disks fine. The laptop will have to live
out the rest of its days configured as is, running jessie and wheezy;
too much of it is broken for anything else to be installed.

Cheers,
David.