Am Freitag, 23. September 2011 schrieb Alex: > Any comments on the "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) > firmware" and its ability to preclude booting from alternative > operating systems such as Linux, BSD etc., would be greatly > appreciated, as per article entitled "Windows 8 secure boot would > 'exclude' Linux" at > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/21/secure_boot_firmware_linux_excl > usion_fears/
First I think that Linux already has too much market share for this to go through silently. Look at those articles, also at Heise. Second I did not yet get UEFI and/or GPT to work with Linux 3.0 on a brand new ThinkPad T520 with newest UEFI capable BIOS. Only MBR with BIOS does work currently. Not even GPT with BIOS boot. To me currently that whole UEFI stuff is just a pile of crap - cause BIOS vendors just test with Windows. Initial ThinkPad T520 didn´t even boot Linux from MBR with BIOS unless I marked one partition bootable which Linux does not require at all. Consider blog entries by Matthew Garrett including, but not limited to UEFI secure booting - part 1 and 2: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5552.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5850.html To me it seems that computer firmwares on the PC platform, namely BIOS, are one of the last largest portion of proprietary crap that Linux users can´t easily avoid unless Coreboot becomes more widespread. But even then there are upgradeability issues. But I also do not know an easy solution right now although I would like to flash a Linux kernel directly to the CMOS flash. The PC platform sucks so big time regarding partitioning schemes and firmwares that it is not even funny anymore. MBR is just beyond words while Amiga with Rigid Disk Block (RDB) has had something that was that much more advanced that one could think it has been imported from another universe. And then GPT rectifies lots of MBR problems at the price of way more complexity than what IMHO is needed. And EFI drives the complexity to a level that UEFI was invented which as far as I understand was an aim to simplify things again. I really pray for some sanity regarding: - computer firmwares - partitioning schemes - and a interoperable filesystem for hotplugable storage devices, cause FAT32 is a joke nowadays and ExFAT is not by any means free as far was I heard Somehow I hope that Linux becomes widespread enough to have hardware vendors build hardware specifically for it instead of breaking things horribly just to accomodate for limitations in Windows. Pile of s..., if you ask me. Thanks, -- Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201109232047.49869.mar...@lichtvoll.de
