Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs [LWN.net]

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 7:17 UTC (Fri) by eduperez (guest, #11232)
Parent article: Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Fortunately, all computers I own are modern enough not to need a replacement for some years, because I really fear the day I finally need to go buy a new computer and have to deal with all this crap.

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UEFI has advantages too

Posted Nov 16, 2012 8:01 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] (2 responses)

I intentionally sought a new machine that supported UEFI, because I wanted to play with some of the awesome stuff it makes possible, like loading a firmware module to export the hard drive contents over iSCSI/NBD/whatever.

So far I've had nothing but good experiences. I turned off legacy boot in BIOS and am booting both Fedora 17 and Windows 7 with UEFI boot. It's great; they don't fight over the boot sector anymore, as they have their own separate UEFI boot partitions. Boot is faster. The "BIOS" setup interface is way less awful than anything I've ever used before. There are no volume size problems to worry about thanks to the GPT.

Don't lose sight of the fact that regular BIOSes are awful in all sorts of ways too. At least with UEFI the vendor can fix them without needing to get their bios-assembly-code magicians out of their padded room.

I'm not saying UEFI won't present problems - it does. Just that those problems are not all new or unique.

This particular issue has cropped up repeatedly in ACPI tables, to the point where Linux now just reports its self as Windows to ACPI to stop manufacturers doing idiotic things like this.

UEFI has advantages too

Posted Nov 16, 2012 12:22 UTC (Fri) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

Thanks for your feedback. When I talked about "all this crap", I was not referring to UEFI in general, but these "implementation details"; having another "feature" to check whether it works with Linux or not is a pain in the ass.

UEFI has advantages too

Posted Nov 16, 2012 15:30 UTC (Fri) by cruff (subscriber, #7201) [Link]

I too wanted to use UEFI on my new Dell Precision T3600 workstation, but I found that several recent Linux Distributions all had problems installing or running correctly once installed with UEFI enabled. I finally gave up and reenabled BIOS based booting so I could use the PERC card and get some work done. We've also seen a lot of issues getting things set just right on some IBM x3650 servers so we even have a chance at performing remote management in various problem scenarios.

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 20:48 UTC (Fri) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link] (1 responses)

I am very happy with my Lenovo X121e. I wiped Windows off it, and it has run Fedora 17 and now 18 beautifully, booting using EFI.

Garrett: More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

Posted Nov 16, 2012 21:21 UTC (Fri) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

I have and love an x121e, boot Linux exclusively and didn't realise that it supported EFI. Is there any reason I might consider using it?