Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EFI Sucks (2012)

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#31

Post by krylon »

ttflee wrote: post #5

> It's just sad how people always try to "improve" on old standard interfaces by then over-designing the improvements to the point where the new interface is just overwhelmed by complexity. Did Linus also criticize the complexity and untested nature of systemd?

I vaguely remember Linus finding some strong words when the systemd developers wanted to integrate dbus into the kernel.

(IIRC, they claimed it offered better performance, Linus ran some benchmarks and claimed the kernel-dbus implementation performed worse than the regular dbus daemon. My memory on the subject is fairly vague, though, so don't take my word on it.)

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#32

Post by zaarn »

AstralStorm wrote: post #23
tscs37 wrote: post #4

A lot of the painpoints are gone, understandbly, but some still exist. The biggest suck on EFI is that it uses PE fileformats. I would have liked it more if it would have just loaded a raw PIC binary or ELF. And not used Windows Calling Conventions.

That is not important. The real bad part is that you still cannot easily load modules of your own to work around broken setup by mainboard manufacturer or Intel or boot rom in the device. This essentially causes lock in. Or even disable some broken modules. (Security has nothing to do with it, the module can be crypto signed by user installed key.) Plus the critical hardware setup documentation is not being released…

That's more of an implementation problem of common EFI vendors, not EFI itself, sans SMI and mmaps.

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#33

Post by krylon »

digi_owl wrote: post #22

So more of Torvalds on EFI: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html And here he is on ACPI: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/acpi.html

"There are two kinds of interfaces: the simple ones, and the broken ones."

If only more people kept that in mind. ;-)

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#34

Post by zaarn »

xxs wrote: post #28
rkangel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAT32 is a good choice IMO. It's the simplest of the "mainstream" filesystems.

correct me if I am wrong but it's still patented by Microsoft. Also time precision is up to even seconds (i.e. it can not store file stamp 'modified at 10:00:01')

FAT is only patented if you want long filenames. If 8~3 filenames are long enough (and for EFI boot they are) then you can use FAT32 with short names.

Additionally the specific EFI FAT32 implementation grants various patent rights which means you can implement EFI FAT32 (atleast, last time I checked by the situation)

The other restrictions of the FS barely matter since 99.9% of the time it's used as /boot it will be read from and has barely any activity. The data integrity can be insured by setting up secureboot (MS or User/Setup mode)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Patents

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#35

Post by mercer »

nikofeyn wrote: post #11
colanderman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus has endowed the world with what is possibly objectively one of the greatest, and most historically significant, pieces of software ever to exist. He's entitled to his opinion. To claim he isn't, because the greater open-source ecosystem is fragmented and not user-friendly, is kind of like saying John Lennon has no right to complain about disco, because hippies are smelly.

i never claimed he wasn't entitled. i have simply stated i am tired of his complaints and rants. and my point is that the world he has helped nurture is not without its travesties, so maybe he should concentrate on that rather than constantly bitching about what other people have built. it would be nice if you stopped twisting my comments to say what you think they say. and i don’t even understand your retort anyway.

"i would just like to get error messages that actually said something more than something went wrong. yea, no shit something went wrong, i already know that, but what and why and how do i fix it are questions i want answered. i know the code knows what went wrong, so just tell me."

..and then a whole bunch of other comments with you bitching and being entitled about stuff.

Hi pot!

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#36

Post by zaarn »

garmaine wrote: post #26
pebers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex; there is nothing else to do all the things that it does. Whereas for BIOS and EFI the argument would be that they should do as little as possible to hand over to the real operating system.

> but a pretty obvious retort is that it's necessarily complex I would like to offer, as a counter example, every micro kernel ever.

You mean all those micro kernels that are in widespread use and see huge market shares?

The closest relative is NT and that is a hybrid, not purely micro. Modular and hybrid kernels (Linux and NT respectively) offer better external vs internal complexity tradeoffs; Linux and NT are internally complex since they do all the hard stuff, micorkernels are externally complex since someone else needs to do the hard work.

Microkernels will shove this exact complexity elsewhere not make it go away.

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#37

Post by snvzz »

There's a lot about it that's bad, but the worst is definitely that it allows the firmware to keep running after the OS boots, interfering with its normal operation. Thanks to SMI, the system is non-deterministic: No latency promises can be made.

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#38

Post by raverbashing »

digi_owl wrote: post #22

So more of Torvalds on EFI: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html And here he is on ACPI: http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/acpi.html

Linus spent a lot of energy and Management by Perkele to make sure stuff worked and kept stable under ACPI. People would submit patches that fixed some things and broke others, and Linus put a stop to this

I'm not so sure about the ACPI standard, it certainly has some warts but the main issue seems to be manufacturers who ship the thing once their hardware manages to boot Windows. Once. And note I said boot, not run.

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#39

Post by chungy »

xxs wrote: post #28
rkangel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAT32 is a good choice IMO. It's the simplest of the "mainstream" filesystems.

correct me if I am wrong but it's still patented by Microsoft. Also time precision is up to even seconds (i.e. it can not store file stamp 'modified at 10:00:01')

> Also time precision is up to even seconds (i.e. it can not store file stamp 'modified at 10:00:01')

In the pure form of the file system, yes, but with VFAT (which also adds long file names, creation time stamps, and access time stamps), the precision is exactly 1 second increments.

Re: EFI Sucks (2012)

#40

Post by swiley »

The one thing I really love about EFI on non-macs is that you don't need a boot loader. You just compile your kernel with an EFI stub and whatever you want in the initrd and then select it with the firmware GUI.

That's nice

Post reply on HN