From cpgh...@cordula.ws Thu Oct 25 03:40:28 2012
Heh... ;-)
(U)EFI is nothing new for us old farts: we've had OpenBoot[1] on
Sun hardware for ages, and even though it didn't limit us w.r.t. the
OS you wanted to boot (that's why you can install FreeBSD/sparc64
on used Sun machines), it had its issues too. Mainly that it needed
a counter-part in hardware peripherals. E.g.: without F-Code in ROM,
a PCI-based frame buffer wouldn't be usable there, because it wouldn't
reply to the OpenBoot queries.
The point is that firmware CAN be a mini-OS and more powerful
than PC-BIOS. There's nothing wrong with that, and the flexibility
of OFW/OpenBoot was for us sysadmins invaluable, esp. with
diskless machines. What's wrong, is UEFI's DRM-scheme used to
prevent non-signed code to be loaded... without mandating in
the specs that the BIOS vendor MUST allow the device owner
to add his/her own keys to it. That's the evil part of it.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
I'm probably missing something here.
ia64 uses EFI, but there's nothing
about checking for "non-signed" code.
I can boot VMS, FreeBSD, linux, etc.
And, by the way, firmware updates from EFI via e.g.
USB flash drives is trivial on ia64.
Perhaps what you are describing is not about the EFI
specification iteself, but what
different manufacturers add on top of it?
Anton
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
