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

Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

Posted Feb 19, 2013 17:15 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform by drag
Parent article: Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

> It's BIOS++. It's a massive increase in complexity with no payoff other then having a facier GUI for configuring your boot devices.

I don't know about that, while it's doing the same task of initializing the hardware, it is doing so using much more normal, modern tooling without some of the restrictions of the 1980's BIOS as OS kernel. It's restricted by the task being accomplished and not the impoverished environment.

I would ask BIOS/uEFI, firmware and bootloader developers which environment they prefer as they are the constituents who are most affected by the design.

Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

Posted Feb 19, 2013 20:38 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

A lot of operating systems completely ignore the bios once they've loaded. That to me, seems a pretty sensible and simple approach. Works fine.

The only thing that UEFI has in its favour is that it does provide protection against root kits - if done properly. Given the mess that is usually done, what's the betting we start getting rot-kits that exploit the UEFI real soon now ...

Cheers,
Wol

Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

Posted Feb 20, 2013 12:59 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>I would ask BIOS/uEFI, firmware and bootloader developers which environment they prefer as they are the constituents who are most affected by the design.

From my selfish end-user perspective, I very much like that with UEFI my boot time is no longer dominated by the time spent before even reaching the boot loader. To be honest, that's the only quality I've ever cared about in a BIOS.

(Of course, there's still room for improvement!)