shouldn't the machine just be able to load your OS kernel directly? [LWN.net]

shouldn't the machine just be able to load your OS kernel directly?

Posted Mar 1, 2013 1:00 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform by raven667
Parent article: Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

How will it know where to find the kernel?

More to the point, how will the bios be able to tell the kernel all the important options it needs to know?

Your bios will be like LILO (which had to be re-installed every time you made a change to the kernel). Or like CP/M (which had to do a "sysregen" every time the hardware changed).

Cheers,
Wol

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shouldn't the machine just be able to load your OS kernel directly?

Posted Mar 1, 2013 1:15 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Well this horse might already be out of the stable with UEFI but creating a way to make variables available to the kernel image doesn't seem impossible, maybe stored as EFI variables in a standard way, or as files on the boot filesystem. How did HPUX boot? That's what EFI was designed for. Maybe the tools aren't there now because there wasn't enough participation by Linux vendors or the Linux Foundation when these issues were decided, no one is going to hand you a seat at the table for these kinds of things, you have to insert yourself worth force if you don't want to be run over.

shouldn't the machine just be able to load your OS kernel directly?

Posted Mar 1, 2013 1:35 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

EFI has that information stored in the nvram boot variables.