4 ms·

I don't see why Linux users would care about this. It boots the system, nobody cares it uses some old MS tech.

• blueflow 5y ago
  Because "removing legacy" was one of the key arguments of EFI enthusiasts, and its still plenus bovis stercus.
  • froh 5y ago
    "Full of faeces from cows" is and remains vulgar no matter how it's spelled.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      There's nothing "vulgar" whatsoever about cow dung. It is an eco-friendly, renewable material and commonly used for many sacred rituals in India.
      • tpush 5y ago
        The GP literally used it as a weird coded insult to UEFI (for whatever reason), India doesn't really enter this discussion.
  • prmoustache 5y ago
    Your point is a bit moot because removing bios support will actually allow the maintainer to stop maintaining the bios parts regardless of the fact some other old things are kept. While actually not removing bios support won't allow you to get rid of the aformentionned MS techs such as fat support. Having said that I think this is a wee bit early.
    • blueflow 5y ago
      You made a factual mistake: MBR/BIOS based boot does not depend on a specific filesystem, nor does it depend on a specific executable file format except for the boot sector. You can safely remove FAT support from your kernel config, except when you need it for EFI.
      • prmoustache 5y ago
        > You made a factual mistake: MBR/BIOS based boot does not depend on a specific filesystem, nor does it depend on a specific executable file format except for the boot sector. I never said that. I said removing bios support allows you to remove anything that provides bios support and that choosing to not remove it won't allow you to get rid of the EFI dependencies so it is a moot point to talk about old techs used by EFI.
• tremon 5y ago
  It doesn't just "boot the system". The full EFI specification includes support for runtime services, i.e. proprietary code that keeps running even after your FLOSS operating system has booted. That's something Linux users should care about: it provides a backdoor for clinging to closed-source drivers on a pretend-open platform. There's already been proof-of-concept EFI viruses, it's only a matter of time until the first antivirus EFI service appears.
  • mjg59 5y ago
    The UEFI runtime services provide functionality that is not generically exposed through any other OS environment. Linux could just refuse to provide those runtime features, and things would roughly work[1] - we'd still need to call some UEFI features in the boot stub, but the same is true of BIOS (look at what the 16-bit code does in terms of obtaining information that the kernel uses after init). If you want to drop all access to runtime services after kernel boot, you can by simply passing efi=noruntime to the kernel arguments. [1] Some features would be broken, like recognising whether the system had booted successfully
    • anthk 5y ago
      Even back in the BIOS days Linux overrode lots of BIOS stuff such as partition size limits once it booted.
    • tremon 5y ago
      can efivarfs still be accessed after booting with efi=noruntime? If so, I might add that on my systems and see if anything breaks.
      • mjg59 5y ago
        No, all runtime services are gone. You don't /strictly/ need them in order to boot - most Linux distributions will install a loader in the fallback path and the firmware will run it even if there are no boot entries.