Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

I’d probably design something a bit more featured than a BIOS, but definitely not as much as EFI. No command shell either, but definitely something that supports a serial console as first tier input/output like Sun OpenBOOT does.

Or I’d just use OpenBOOT. I mean, OpenFirmware existed, and was used left and right in the industry, before EFI came to be. It’s not without its own problems (such as, initialising only the first four megs of RAM on my SPARCstation) but not as crazily huge either.

Bootloaders are extensible. New filesystems. Network boot, even http. iSCSI. AOE. nbd. New operating systems. Co-processors that turn a computer of one architecture, say an m68k Amiga, into something entirely different, such as a PowerPC machine (those cards do exist and are supported by Linux, so this is not just speculation, although I’ve not seen something similar for PCs in the last decade; I don’t limit my horizon to PCs though).