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by phendrenad2 296 days ago
I don't understand the hatred for UEFI. It seems like people get irrationally disgusted when they find out that it's a big complex standard with lots of extraneous stuff that almost nobody cares about (on desktop, that is). Just give me text, a framebuffer, file system access, and a memory map. It's not difficult. Sadly I think that no one will be happy until there is some equally-overwrought spec on the ARM side.
2 comments

People have rose-tinted glasses for BIOS, have no idea of all sorts of hidden complexity that was involved in it, assumptions, etc. Or all the broken ideas that vendors put into BIOS-era firmware [0].

People also rarely think of the complexity inherent in having an open platform where owner of a device does not need to build/acquire a custom OS build for their machine, and thus see cases of "enough to run something they care about" and think that's enough.

[0] I still remember BIOS config menus and PCI card option roms that effectively had stripped down windows 3.0 in them, or an approximation of it. And how it meant presence of Intel PCI hardware RAID controller in certain server meant I needed a full crash cart or remote KVM to fix RAID config.

Hrrm. File system. WTF do I need to have a VFATed EFI partiton somewhere, when I'm not using VFAT, or NTFS at all?