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by vetinari 995 days ago
He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3). It does not prevent supporting other filesystems, as well as other partition schemes or volume formats (nothing prevents UEFI from supporting LVM, for example), but only FAT and GPT are mandatory (i.e. "must"). Thus only FAT and GPT are implemented in 100% of shipped computers.

Yes, you can get Intel NUC and yes, it does support NTFS in UEFI. It is also compliant with UEFI (i.e. "can"). But is is completely useless, if you are shipping media, that should be bootable by 100% of UEFI-using machines. It is usefull, only when you are targeting such machines specifically.
3 comments
rcxdude 995 days ago
That is exactly what he's saying, except on top he's saying that rufus can supply a driver for NTFS for UEFI firmware that does not support it.
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vetinari 995 days ago
He frames it differently; more optimistic than the reality on the ground. He is also conflating things in a way that does not work (just because Intel ships something does not means that it is a standard to benchmark compliance to spec against it; it creates unnecessary confusion. Intel has a right to implement things above the spec, but it does not mean that spec mandates such things).

You can ship your own filesystems, volume managers, device drivers... but they should be signed with a key trusted by Secure Boot, if you want them to be useful at all. Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.

As a result, nobody (nobody in Spolsky's sense) really bothers. When you are shipping bootable media, fat is good enough. It will boot your binary, do stuff it is supposed to do, and everybody goes on with their lives.

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Macha 995 days ago
> Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.

We have very different experiences, I must say. Mine is that Linux installers that do support Secure Boot are having to go out of their way to point that out to users because people are just disabling secure boot as step 0 by default.

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rcxdude 995 days ago
That same page claims that disabling secure boot is no longer necessary (though most users are in fact used to it by now). It very much seems like the feature does actually just work in most cases.
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deaddodo 995 days ago
> He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3).

He literally addresses that. Saying that the one thing the Spec does is require that, at the very least, you can boot from FAT32.

When he says the spec doesn't require FAT32, he means nothing in the spec says your device itself should be FAT32 and that it's fully conformant to use a UEFI:NTFS driver to load from a USB stick.

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AshamedCaptain 995 days ago
And the only reason some UEFI implementsions support NTFS is as usual because of MS's monopoly. They don't have to specify it as the standard, it just becomes one.

Heck, NTFS is more commonly supported on UEFI implementstions than exFAT is, even when there is no free (as in gratis) implementation of the former, but there are several for the latter.

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