Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform [LWN.net]

Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

Posted Feb 19, 2013 9:49 UTC (Tue) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
In reply to: Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform by hummassa
Parent article: Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

This does not matter. It’s a closed platform, restricted, and besides the ability to take over your own machine works only for amd64, not for ARM, if it’s Microsoft® certified.

Just boycott this crap.

Who wants a several-Mebibytes long shitload of EFI, when a BIOS is just enough to boot a proper operating system?

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Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

Posted Feb 19, 2013 17:22 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

You contradict yourself, machines where you control the keys are not restricted or closed...

I fully agree that it's reasonable to prefer open devices, you don't have to buy an MS Surface, get a Nexus 7 where you can replace the OS. If you don't want closed crap, don't buy it, there is a big enough market for open devices for them to remain available.

As far as EFI, I would ask which environment firmware and bootloader developers prefer, the impoverished environment of a 1980's era BIOS kernel or the more modern, comprehensive tooling of EFI (and GPT and dedicated boot partitions, etc. ad infinitum).

Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

Posted Feb 19, 2013 18:39 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Who wants a several-Mebibytes long shitload of EFI, when a BIOS is just enough to boot a proper operating system?

Apparently the answer is anyone who wants to use recent Intel's CPU (scroll down to Closed bits and open bits and then further to bits about Management Engine).