> On Oct 16, 2017, at 11:18 AM, Dr. Nikolaus Klepp <dr.klepp@???> wrote:
>

> Am Samstag, 7. Oktober 2017 schrieb Tobias Hunger:
>> On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 3:46 PM, Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:
>>>    Then maybe I misunderstood the reason for EFI.

>>
>> UEFI is a huge step forward in pretty much all areas and makes booting
>> both simpler and more powerful.

The Northern Virginia Linux Users Group (NoVALUG) had a great presentation on uEFI. [1] It is two hours long, but it goes into the history of EFI (dating back to the mid-90s), the issues with BIOS, and the mechanics of booting with uEFI.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRGDXy65Plg

>> UEFI has a couple more features:
>>
>> * UEFI allows for better hardware support (graphical login at full
>> resolution, mouse support, RAID drivers, etc.)
>> * UEFI allows for more security with secure boot. E.g. my thinkpad
>> *only* boots things that I have signed with my key.
>> * UEFI allows for different OSes living next to each other peacefully,
>> without the constant fight over who writes the MBR and with that
>> defines the boot loader.
>
> You forgot to mention that UEFI is the best code in the world written by the the best of the best and therefore absolutely secure.

Where is this coming from? I don’t know of anyone who has ever said that, because there isn’t one uEFI implementation any more than there is one BIOS implementation.

Most uEFI implementations are not complete, instead they have just enough to get the particular machine running as shipped. From time to time, uEFI implementations have serious bugs in them. Both of these statements can be made about BIOS implementations, too.

The size of disks and the size of memory has far exceeded what 16-bit code can handle, which is how BIOS executes. uEFI gets us away from the cylinder:head:sector layout, which hasn’t been valid for mechanical hard drives for decades (tracks have variable sector counts), let alone that no SSD has cylinders or heads.

The bullets Tobias has above are correct, although, technically, secureboot is built on top of uEFI, not as a part of it.

jf
--
John Franklin
franklin@???