No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 3:01 PM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #175

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #163

Not sure why loaders are a separate beast any more. In the bad old days, ROMs had very limited space. Lots of bootloader packages got invented, tiny things that knew just enough about ROM and the filesystem to get the 'real' code loaded, maybe un-zipped, maybe unencrypted. Later, some network-boot options which were handy. Today? The boot flash is huge (compared to ROMs). You can put an entire OS in there! In fact, n…

The reason is very simple, you only get to call ExitBootServices() once (absent hacks that hook the function). If you want to be able to do anything prior to calling ExitBootServices(), such as choose what EFI application you want to use and options you want to pass it, you need a service built to provide you that interface which itself does not call ExitBootServices(). The name of that service is the bootloader.

Post by happycube » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 3:37 PM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #356

korhojoa wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer motherboards haven't had gpus for a while now (IPMI usually comes with one, so servers do), they're built in to the CPU (if they are, not all cpus have them). These can't usually be easily allocated to a vm.

I clicked randomly on a number of motherboards sold by the 2 brands that came to my mind, Asrock and Gigabyte, and all of them advertised hdmi and usb-c graphics output so I am surprised by your declaration that consumer motherboards don't have GPU. If I am not mistaken on AMD Ryzen architecture it comes down to choosing a CPU with a G or 3D suffix which states they have an integrated GPU.

Post by wvh » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 3:54 PM UTC

Post by prmoustache » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 4:30 PM UTC

eyeris wrote: post #359

prmoustache wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked randomly on a number of motherboards sold by the 2 brands that came to my mind, Asrock and Gigabyte, and all of them advertised hdmi and usb-c graphics output so I am surprised by your declaration that consumer motherboards don't have GPU. If I am not mistaken on AMD Ryzen architecture it comes down to choosing a CPU with a G or 3D suffix which states they have an integrated GPU.

It really still is the case that most if not all consumer motherboards don’t have built in graphics. For the most part especially on the intel side, they’ve relied on the iGPU in the CPU for output for probably 10 years now

Post by anticensor » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 4:43 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #157

aaronmdjones wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to load it at boot time it absolutely must be done through an initramfs. Is that right? Yes, because it cannot be part of the kernel image, or it would be illegal (a violation of the GPL license) to distribute that kernel. Therefore, it must be a module, and that module has to live somewhere and be loaded by something. If root is on ZFS, this must therefore live in an initramfs and be loaded by it so that the i…

It doesn't have to be a module if you're building the kernel for yourself. No violation in that.