[AstralStorm]

How old is UEFI now? Pity nobody deprecated BIOS alongside long mode.

[deaddodo]

BIOS is deprecated. All of its functionality on new motherboards is basically emulated via the UEFI; and it's certainly not being extended upon.

Deprecated doesn't mean deleted, it just means "no longer updated/developed with a goal towards removal".

[livrem]

This killed FreeDOS (and presumably all the other *DOS as well) on modern hardware unfortunately. It was fun as long as it lasted. I do not know what the next-best single-user, single-process, non-bloated OS would be to run on modern hardware that still has some reasonably modern software and can be used for distraction-free (hobby) development the way FreeDOS could.

[jasaldivara]

> I do not know what the next-best single-user, single-process, non-bloated OS would be to run on modern hardware that still has some reasonably modern software and can be used for distraction-free (hobby) development the way FreeDOS could.

Not sure why would you want a single-process OS on modern hardware, but there are some alternatives that run much less things on the background than regular Linux: Haiku, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or some lightweight non-glibc, non-systemd Linux-based like Adelie or Alpine.

[nineteen999]

Or, you know, just booting the Linux kernel with init=/bin/sh with /bin/sh being a statically linked binary. You're overthinking things.

[rwmj]

What's the reason why FreeDOS can't use the CSM (the BIOS compatibility mode of UEFI)?

[EvanAnderson]

AFAIK it can. I believe some UEFI implementations don't have CSM.

[p_l]

a Type 3 UEFI implementation has no CSM, Type 2 has CSM available, Type 1 enforces booting into CSM (what many "BIOS"es actually was in later days)

[EvanAnderson]

Thanks for that. That sent me down an enjoyable rabbit hole. I got started with PCs back in the 80s and became fairly familiar with how boot worked back then. UEFI happened while I was paying attention to other things and I've never become as familiar with it as I should be. This was a good excuse to do some reading.

[deaddodo]

Just for clarification's sake, the proper terminology is "UEFI class" not "type".

Otherwise, this is accurate.

[cl91]

> the next-best single-user, single-process, non-bloated OS

is UEFI.

[trueismywork]

Linux in single user mode

[mschuster91]

That's still multi-process though, there's an awful lot of background tasks running in pretty much every non-fossil kernel version, not to mention userspace daemons (udev, dbus, dhcp) without which most normal userspace stuff doesn't even work.

[Brian_K_White]

None of that exists in single user. When you say init=/bin/foo, then that's it, the only process is /bin/foo.

[ryandrake]

/bin/foo is the initial process. It can fork and/or exec other processes, right?