Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2012 08:52:20 +0100 (BST) From: Anton Shterenlikht <mexas@bristol.ac.uk> To: cpghost@cordula.ws, freebsd@edvax.de Cc: mexas@bristol.ac.uk, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: laptop with no BIOS? or BIOS reflash pain Message-ID: <201210250752.q9P7qKPW090055@mech-cluster241.men.bris.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <CADGWnjVZMR=Qm4m3kHVxR7L5mJx_L7jbrYDU-LYi4y0AgyQ6%2BQ@mail.gmail.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
From cpghost@cordula.ws Thu Oct 25 03:40:28 2012 Heh... ;-) (U)EFI is nothing new for us old farts: we've had OpenBoot[1] on Sun hardware for ages, and even though it didn't limit us w.r.t. the OS you wanted to boot (that's why you can install FreeBSD/sparc64 on used Sun machines), it had its issues too. Mainly that it needed a counter-part in hardware peripherals. E.g.: without F-Code in ROM, a PCI-based frame buffer wouldn't be usable there, because it wouldn't reply to the OpenBoot queries. The point is that firmware CAN be a mini-OS and more powerful than PC-BIOS. There's nothing wrong with that, and the flexibility of OFW/OpenBoot was for us sysadmins invaluable, esp. with diskless machines. What's wrong, is UEFI's DRM-scheme used to prevent non-signed code to be loaded... without mandating in the specs that the BIOS vendor MUST allow the device owner to add his/her own keys to it. That's the evil part of it. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware I'm probably missing something here. ia64 uses EFI, but there's nothing about checking for "non-signed" code. I can boot VMS, FreeBSD, linux, etc. And, by the way, firmware updates from EFI via e.g. USB flash drives is trivial on ia64. Perhaps what you are describing is not about the EFI specification iteself, but what different manufacturers add on top of it? Anton
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?201210250752.q9P7qKPW090055>