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by sigcode 3603 days ago
Does anyone disagree that UEFI has the capability to be an OS itself?

If it is only used as a "BIOS" then is it unreasonably adding the surface area for bugs and attacks? Is it much larger and more complex than legacy BIOS?

Is this trade-off proportional to the benefits it provides: obviating need to for developers to understand backwards compatibility?
1 comments
johncolanduoni 3603 days ago
The point of UEFI is not to avoid the need for kernel developers to know how to get into 64-bit mode. If you can't manage to get a computer to do that pretty easily, kernel programming is not for you, and this is mostly limited to the bootloader anyways.

As much as people like to rag on it, UEFI provides a lot of benefits:

- UEFI graphics firmware improves compatibility, and makes things like PCI pass through of GPUs to virtual machines much easier/possible.

- UEFI allows for much faster boot times by cutting out a lot of 16-bit mode/32-bit mode transitions that BIOSes generally used.

- Every operating system doesn't need to fight over the master boot record of your drive, with UEFI they can live in relative peace.

- Things that were simply impossible with a lot of BIOS implementations (e.g. Booting off > 2TB hard drives) are now possible.

It's over-engineered, but so is ACPI (IMO To an even greater degree). Does anyone want to return to the old plug-and-play compatibility mess?

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josteink 3602 days ago
> It's over-engineered, but so is ACPI (IMO To an even greater degree). Does anyone want to return to the old plug-and-play compatibility mess?

In my experience, those who like to rag on UEFI, for whatever problem they deem it to suffer from, are rarely interested in providing other options or solutions to the problems UEFI provenly solve.

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qwertyuiop924 3602 days ago
That's true of any piece of tech. The solution to C++'s problems didn't come from the people who avoided that language entirely, it came from Mozilla, who are up to their eyeballs in C++. People who hate Sexprs still haven't come up with a good replacement.

  They've got XML
Many of the people behind that were Lispers. And anyways, I said a GOOD replacement.

But yeah, the solutions to a problem with a system don't come from the people who hate its guts and won't touch it: It comes from people who use it, need its functionality, and need those warts fixed.

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