[microcolonel]

> And EFI is a good thing, especially considering the monster dumpster fire that is UEFI?

Well it may be a dumpster fire, but it is the finest, most consistent flame we've gotten from the firmware dumpster; which is why it is fast becoming the only standard firmware interface in actual use. UEFI is fast becoming the standard for ARMv8, it's creeping back to ARMv7, and it's becoming popular with RISC-V.

You will either learn to love it, or you will suffer forever. Mark my words, UEFI will still be booting your machine in 2040, when the President is literally a deep fake controlled by a troika of Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, and Priscilla Chan.

[abecedarius]

Not that I've ever coded firmware, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware sounded nice.

[burfog]

It was FORTH, which most developers really hated. Sometimes the end users even got exposed to bits of FORTH poking out, for example in the syntax for booting.

We really just wanted a nice clean 64-bit BIOS, with all the datatypes 64-bit. The BIOS is pretty decent if you strip out redundant interfaces, segmentation, and never-used functionality. Adding extra functionality to firmware is madness. Firmware needs to initialize key hardware like RAM, load a boot loader, and get out of the way. Firmware doesn't need to be practically an OS.

The old 16-bit BIOS was actually working OK. Sure, it was nasty to program for, but almost nobody had to deal with that.

[microcolonel]

Open Firmware was beautiful, but if you're not on POWER, you're probably not going to see it.

[watersb]

Sun SPARC workstations used it. I wonder how many of those are still in use?