Linux EFI Going Through Spring Cleaning Before RISC-V Support Lands

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux EFI Going Through Spring Cleaning Before RISC-V Support Lands

The Linux EFI boot code is going through some "spring cleaning" ahead of the RISC-V EFI support landing that still could make it for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle this spring...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-EFI-Cleaning-Pre-RISCV

[andyprough]

A large number of distros still have problems with UEFI and Secureboot setups. I keep a copy of MX Linux on a live USB with me, as it will boot on nearly anything, has a grub finder menu at boot that will find and boot grub for other distro partitions, and has excellent built-in grub repair tools.

[kylew77]

I remember when UEFI boot first came out the Linux community was basically "ain't no way in hell we are going with that Microsoft boot method." A lot of distros opposed secure boot and UEFI boot in general for years. Now you can't even boot from an NVMe drive without UEFI and motherboards are starting to ship with the CSM legacy boot disabled so even if you wanted to use a SATA drive you would be out of luck. On the BSD side, only the most recent versions have supported UEFI boot. 6.5 was the first for OpenBSD and the very recent 9.0 was the first for NetBSD. Unsure what the first FreeBSD version was but 11.0+ and 12.0+ have worked fine for me so far. If motherboards and laptops start coming out with secure boot being impossible to disable in addition to being UEFI only it is really going to lock out a lot of open source operating systems.

[boxie]

Now you can't even boot from an NVMe drive without UEFI

uhh, i had my nvme drive booting in legacy mode fine before I made the choice to switch over to UEFI, has something changed?

[vladimir86]

I remember when UEFI boot first came out the Linux community was basically "ain't no way in hell we are going with that Microsoft boot method." A lot of distros opposed secure boot and UEFI boot in general for years. Now you can't even boot from an NVMe drive without UEFI and motherboards are starting to ship with the CSM legacy boot disabled so even if you wanted to use a SATA drive you would be out of luck. On the BSD side, only the most recent versions have supported UEFI boot. 6.5 was the first for OpenBSD and the very recent 9.0 was the first for NetBSD. Unsure what the first FreeBSD version was but 11.0+ and 12.0+ have worked fine for me so far. If motherboards and laptops start coming out with secure boot being impossible to disable in addition to being UEFI only it is really going to lock out a lot of open source operating systems.

To be fair, I remember it to be more of a "won't use it as far as we can", I think to remember many articles already assuming at one point "legacy boot" would not exist anymore. And yeah, for me that point has come, and that sucks... a lot. It meant I had to format my old hard drive after buying a new laptop. Also seems to mean stupid long boot times from the power button to the GRUB menu, and a wonderful UEFI "BIOS" that wouldn't even let me deactivate my discrete GPU. All very wonderful.

[Charlie68]

When I bought a new notebook, I was worried about the new UEFI, however both with Ubuntu before, and with openSUSE after and that I currently use, I never had problems, I didn't even disable secure boot.

[kylew77]

uhh, i had my nvme drive booting in legacy mode fine before I made the choice to switch over to UEFI, has something changed?

I think only certain drives support that with a special chip. I have two that don't.