EFI on the desktop is a fucking monstrosity and a waste of time. Fuck you EFI.

Care to elaborate?

Legacy bios all the way

Why? And where is it not a monstrosity?

Agreed.

@fuckwit
EFI opens the door for any operating system you have to be running to dry fuck your firmware. It also makes it easier for vendors to ship massively bloated updates via software update on a typically tiny partition. Previously, this would have required a technical flashing process and therefore the average derp couldn't accomplish it by accident.

I'm predicting a future where we'll need multi gigabyte efi partitions just to hedge against bad behavior in terms of package bloat.

Ease of delivering updates is an advantage IMO. Nowadays major flaws in firmware/patchable only in firmware are found every year. Users don't care, you have to update them automatically or they'll be running insecure firmware for eternity.

@fuckwit EFI is complicated per se, plus firmware manufacturers rarely implement it correctly in my experience. The quality of firmware is particularly low for desktops and laptops.

When I wrote this rant it was because I spent an hour trying to install a Linux system on a new laptop, which wouldn't boot. Turns out this crappy firmware was expecting to find the ESP as the first partition of the disk (which is very common, I know, but its not required by the EFI specification and it's not what I wanted to do)

@gronostaj the fact that EFI solves a real problem does not necessarily make it a good technology

@fuckwit besides this personal experience, I've been working with Secure Boot on servers at work for quite a while, and let me just say: it's extenuating and extremely time consuming.

And of course our firmware had bugs, so we also have to work with the hardware manufacturer to get those fixed, and they don't even take the time to reproduce the issues... Ah, don't get me started!

All they had to do was to add “Next time I boot please add a 10 second delay” button because ssd is fast and I need that delay to boot.

They did what they did instead

@stacked Sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to @SortOfTested.

Now, @stacked ;) It's true that UEFI implementations have their share of problems, but that's not a problem with UEFI per se. It's complex, but that was kinda the point I think (though I agree that it's overengineered in some aspects). Hopefully implementations will mature over time.

Also, I personally love the fact that bootloaders reside in a filesystem and are easily accessible, rather than being stashed in the partition table.

@gronostaj I personally believe that there should be one unopinionated conventional bootloader set in ROM, just like bios. There’ll be almost no way to fuck it up. I know it never gonna happen but hey can I have dreams

@uyouthe Doesn't the bootloader mount the kernel partition? If so, shipping it with the board wouldn't be very wise as you'd have to prepare for all sorts of oddball filesystems, and even then you'd miss some.

@Lor-inc settings standards is hard

@uyouthe UEFI is basically this. Management of boot options in firmware? Check. Standardized bootloader executables? Check. Filesystem-based boot? Check. Extensibility if you need something exotic? Check.

You can boot Linux kernels directly with UEFI, without GRUB and such. It's awesome.

@gronostaj it’s awesome but I want this in ROM even though it’s hardly possible

@stacked I am very well aware of what a clusterfuck EFI is and what horrendous things software can do with it. I also administrate tons of servers, legacy and uefi, and have broken a lot of NVRAM cuz cheap memory go brrr. The promise is quite good and the standard decent. way better and more flexible then legacy bios. But the things is that is a bit too flexible and loose. MB manufactures just implement the bare minimum plus their shitty features and maybe some other things that technically are standardized but not fully so their implementation sucks.

@SortOfTested No it does not. The EFI system itself is still written inside your bios's flash and can only be altered by a bios update.

You are probably talking about the efi partition on your drive. well it technically can execute arbitrary code when you replace the bootloader with your own code and wipe your drives/steal data and whatsoever. BUT the efi partition isnt mounted on windows and can only be mounted as admin. Linux is another story. Additionally to prevent the execution of malicious code on boot you got SecureBoot. Yee microsofts stuff afaik but it prevents exactly what you describe.

The efi spec itself is decent, the implementation... well we dont talk about that.

@gronostaj I still think that the EFI specification is too complex for firmware authors. The firmware industry, even though it's old, is not as mature as the current software industry. There's not even a firmware industry! It's all hardware. Those companies are still stuck with the mentality from the 80s that "people pay for the hardware" and do not understand practices like automated testing or concepts like test coverage.

All they try to do is to give something that "works" somehow. Does it work in all scenarios? Does it support all use cases? Is it confirming to the spec? All these questions don't really matter to them.

Writing a spec like EFI and hoping that firmware authors will implement it correctly is a bit like giving a truck to a 6 years old to drive. They simply don't have enough experience and maturity to handle something that complex. And (sad to say but it's the truth) the world doesn't advance just with good intentions, but with experience and maturity.

@stacked I absolutely agree. So far it's kinda the Vista situation: not exactly bad, just too far ahead of its time. But Vista forced everyone to catch up, so hopefully the same with happen with (U)EFI.