Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why certainly! This is as good of a place to start as any: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTVfAMRj-7E
A 4h40m interview on YouTube is considered a source these days. How about written text? Makes it much easier to read and quote .
LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
181–187 of 187 posts
Re: LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 4h40m interview on YouTube is considered a source these days. How about written text? Makes it much easier to read and quote .
The delivery medium is irrelevant. And yes, this particular video is a good source, since the person in the video is an authority on kernel engineering; his teams have managed to deliver a fully functional storage appliance, a volume manager/filesystem from the future, infinitely extensible kernel and userspace debuggers, a dynamic tracing framework, a very high performance operating system which for more than two de…
Re: LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
The delivery medium is irrelevant. And yes, this particular video is a good source, since the person in the video is an authority on kernel engineering; his teams have managed to deliver a fully functional storage appliance, a volume manager/filesystem from the future, infinitely extensible kernel and userspace debuggers, a dynamic tracing framework, a very high performance operating system which for more than two de…
Oh, the delivery medium and medium are relevant. Not to you , that much is clear. But we've already established your viewpoint is an outlier. The person you're referring to is Bryan Cantrill [1]. For each expert like him, there are also Linux kernel experts, so I am not buying that one [2], sorry. He's been able to rant successfully in text, as you can read on the Wikipedia page. No idea why we'd have to see extremel…
That's an unsubstantiated opinion not backed up by any kind of qualitative evidence.
Re: LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
All very good and very valid points. Just wouldn’t want to do that with Linux. OpenBSD or FreeBSD, yes; illumos, yes; Linux - out of the question.
Literally nobody cares that you don't wanna do that with Linux. That's like your problem. The world needs practical solutions; not *NIX wars or zealotry.
Re: LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can now have a normal partition to put my boot loaders in rather than a hidden chunk at the beginning of the disk. you can make a /boot with BIOS too. format it with FAT and nowadays all bootloaders can access it. in practice, I'm pretty sure GRUB can boot everything but Windows and Mac anyways, so it doesn't really matter. > I can easily update, add and remove boot entries from the OS command line. again, grub h…
/boot is a partition that your boot loader needs to know about ahead of time, and I still have to point my BIOS towards a disk that has the correct code embedded in a section at the beginning of the disk in order to execute it to read its config to know about /boot. With UEFI, the pre-boot system can automatically detect OSes that are installed on any disks that exist, and can let you choose which ones to run before…
the boot entries are stored in the firmware, not on the disk. therefore, any new disks can only boot the default binary (\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI usually). so, if you regularly get new drives, you need to install a boot manager anyways, which is the same as the BIOS experience in the end, except with more chances for the shitty shitty vendor firmware to fuck something up.
> This eliminates the issues of e.g. installing Windows (with its boot loader) and then Linux (with its replacement boot loader) overwriting that and then having to add an entry to boot the old OS, and so on. Now all OSes and boot loaders are accessible from the same level and OS installers don't have to worry about wiping out the other ones unless they're deleting partitions.
1. grub 2 auto-detects Windows by default, and other boot loaders required you to manually write entries anyways; if you forget to add the Windows entry while you're in there anyways, that's your own problem (and no big loss anyways).
2. as I said, the firmware boot entry manager is often if not usually total shit. even better, Windows (or probably some poorly-written vendor drivers that assume you only have Windows) has been reported to fiddle with boot entries even after installation! at least in the BIOS system, I set it up and it worked. now I have to reconfigure it every time I boot into Windows?
> I have had significant issues with Grub when, for example, migrating from one disk to another, having to swap boot drives, change kernel boot parameters, run chroots, and so on, all to make sure that Grub puts the right code at the start of the right disk to point to the right partition ID to read the right config file to load the right kernel.
If you configure your /etc/fstab correctly, none of these steps are necessary. literally no configuration is necessary if you just use the "dd" command. if you use "cp", obviously you will need to reinstall the boot loader. this is the only thing that the ESP does better (as long as you remember to copy the ESP contents and not just the main filesystem, but that's not too hard).
Re: LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
#186IMO, the problems that [U]EFI introduces (that far exceed the historical limitations it overcomes) should be self-evident . IMO, he should not have to argue against having multiple, redundant copies of drivers, shells and utilties each accessible only in its own "OS" (UEFI, GRUB, OS). It should not be a debate. This is definitely not "defense in depth". IMO, whomever controls the first OS controls the computer becaus…
> These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer owner control, more vendor control. What control did you have with an old PC BIOS that you now are missing with UEFI? Things like SMM and Intel ME that keep running after your actual OS has started existed and were pretty much ubiquitous before UEFI became comm…
I personally don't have a huge issue with UEFI, for me it has made dual/multi-booting Linux and Windows much much safer as I don't have to worry about the boot manager for one OS trashing the boot manager for the other.
Re: LinuxBoot: Linux as Firmware
#187BTW, on the flip side of the UEFI haters, i.e. things that I can do with UEFI more easily than BIOS (or at all). I can now have a normal partition to put my boot loaders in rather than a hidden chunk at the beginning of the disk. I can easily update, add and remove boot entries from the OS command line. I can forgo bootloaders entirely and use Linux as UEFI application. I can use GPT and finally partition as much as…
On other hand - a common partition that is shared among all operating systems has too high chance of getting corrupted or simply blown away by another install. Just yesterday - RHEL7.5 beta install overwrote UEFI entry of Ubuntu for me and Ubuntu became unbootable. On another laptop - Fedora blew away my Windows bootloader from UEFI partition and I have been too lazy to recover it. Also - because UEFI partition actua…