"100% Free" GNU Boot Discovers Again They Have Been Shipping Non-Free Code

[ssokolow]

You didn't understand. The Linux kernel will receive all the necessary information from UEFI to boot. but the Linux kernel will load on its own. The linux kernel will need UEFI only to provide the boot information. then we won't be afraid of who and when and how UEFI is written and what it contains.

The "hard part" that these UEFI replacements need to cover, which the Linux kernel doesn't, is the low-level bring-up. You wanna know why ARM devices are such a shitshow and Snapdragon X doesn't yet Just Work™ with Linux? Because the model you're advocating for was applied, so each device needs to have a description of which pins connect to which chips and which states to set them into in which order hard-coded into the kernel build for them to work.

You're advocating for the motherboard equivalent of what a mess hard drive support used to be before we got Integrated Drive Electronics and Logical Block Addressing.

Abstraction is good, mmm-kay.

...or, alternatively, if you're arguing for something with less glitzy mouse-driven config UI:

1. That won't solve the problem because that's not where the problematic binary blobs that Coreboot has and GNU Boot rejects are.
2. The because Bob needs a bonus factor will never let motherboard manufacturers do that.

[brad0]

can't people teach the kernel to boot on its own without loaders? such an approach would solve many problems.

If you don't understand how anything works that might make sense.

[archkde]

Big surprise, that’s exactly how it works right now.

This is not fully correct, many operations rely on ACPI tables, runtime services or SMM.

[user556]

SMM is evil.

[intelfx]

This is not fully correct, many operations rely on ACPI tables, runtime services or SMM.

ACPI is not part of UEFI, and neither is SMM. UEFI Runtime Services are not used to "load" the kernel, either.

[ahrs]

I doubt that you have understood me correctly. now UEFI has taken over all the work of the loader. the kernel does not load on its own. and it won't be able to do it for a long time.

The Linux kernel is not a UEFI, it is an EFI (assuming built with EFI_STUB support). There are people like Google that propose replacing bootloaders with Linux that then does nothing but kexec into the thing you actually want to use but even then you still need some sort of firmware to get to this stage.

[dlq84]

can't people teach the kernel to boot on its own without loaders? such an approach would solve many problems.

The kernel can already be booted without a bootloader. But there is also UEFI and BIOS...

[rhadlee]

These free software ideologues are sk far removed from real-world concerns that it gets downright laughable. What a waste of talent!

[OneTimeShot]

These free software ideologues are sk far removed from real-world concerns that it gets downright laughable. What a waste of talent!

I don't get it - why not just use MacOS if you don't care about free software? It's Unix too and has pretty decent software support.

[mos87]

the zealots have no goal only a path