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This would be even better if it were a chat interface to ChatGPT so you could ask it troubleshooting questions next time your machine won't boot into OS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you very much, I've spent a lot of time on them over the past week and am really pleased to hear that you enjoyed them!
I was really impressed when I clicked the reload button -- inspiring attention to detail! How did you create those?
The animations are made using a small animation system that I made for this post. This system has two useful properties:
1. It allows me to animate whatever property of the object I’m interested in (alpha, frame, etc).
2. It allows me to set up other work to be triggered when the animation has reached a certain completion threshold, which lets the animations flow into each other. This is how (for example) the grid lines ‘cascade’ in after each other.
The 3D animations are also primarily HTML canvases, and I used Three.js to place them as textures in a 3D scene. I have some logic to map the coordinate system of the canvases to the 3D scene, so that I can draw the connective tissue between the canvases and run animations that operate on objects both on the 2D canvases and the 3D scene.
I don't know whether to think this is awesome, or a horrifying demonstration of bloat in UEFI.
You are right and it is already going your way, even if you are not seeing it yet.
Hi everyone! As a bit of a gag, I’ve made a graphical IRC Client that runs entirely in the UEFI preboot environment. It features completely overdone features such as TrueType fonts, a cursor, and GUI decorations. I first started this project as I was getting a bit tired building a from-scratch GPS receiver, and wanted to make something relatively quick and lighthearted. As tends to happen, this took a fair bit longer…
I would contend that software too large to cram into UEFI is all superfluous bloatware anyway. In my day, we had dual 360k floppies and that was plenty!
The focus there was on adding TCP support to barebox though and it lacks your nice GUI elements. Only interface was CLI (which can be drawn on top of EFI GOP when barebox is built as EFI payload).
[1]: https://lore.barebox.org/barebox/20220401145902.GF4351@telli...
I think it also emphasizes the complexity and capability of software that underlies the systems most people think about. I think it is a common misconception that your OS is the "lowest level" of the software stack, but in actuality, there is this firmware-ish code that truly owns your system. Sometimes it does a job and goes away, other times stays running the whole time your system is up, transparent even to the OS.
Sometimes, the attitude people have about this is along the lines of... "who cares, its just low level code to get my devices running, nothing serious can happen down there".
But knowing that you can get a whole IRC client down there doesn't make it too hard to imagine all the other nefarious things that could go on.
This is super cool. Had no idea UEFI APIs were so readily-available and well-documented. Awesome work! Out of curiosity, what was the dev cycle like? I assume you were running the thing in a VM. Did you have to "boot up" every time you wanted to run the client?
The other commenter is correct that the work loop typically revolved around booting a QEMU instance which ships my UEFI application. The main run script will regenerate an EFI filesystem that contains a fresh build of UEFIRC, then pass it to QEMU.
However, the overhead here can get a bit cumbersome when trying to build a GUI. I set things up such that the app could target either bare-bones UEFI, or a hosted environment that runs on my Mac. By flipping a build flag, my GUI toolkit would either draw directly to the UEFI-provided framebuffer, or would hook into my Mac's windowing system and receive/push events to that. You can see some of the overhead of this 'dual-target' approach in the app's entry point: https://github.com/codyd51/uefirc/blob/main/src/main.rs.
Parsing IRC messages also really doesn't need any accoutrements, so I developed those with a unit test suite running directly on my Mac - you can see part of that here: https://github.com/codyd51/uefirc/blob/main/src/irc/response....
This does the hard bit of networking that QuickLook skipped though.