Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

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There's no reason these days something like an efi partition couldn't be put in flash next to the firmware, cheap. SSDs on the other hand are still expensive, after many years I was just able to afford a 512GB.

In the 90s I used the ibm? (I think) boot manager with 4 or 5 OSs, it took a one or two megabytes and worked quite well. That is more choices than are practical, honestly. And with VMs and containers less necessary than ever. (I do like GPT.) Doesn't have to be that small today, but shows what is possible. Xosl too.

Thirdly developing a completely new proprietary OS (uefi) when embedded Linux exists is about as cynical and wasteful as they come.

> There's no reason these days something like an efi partition couldn't be put in flash next to the firmware, cheap. SSDs on the other hand are still expensive, after many years I was just able to afford a 512GB.

Unless you want to switch your HDD to another computer and have it boot properly?

That doesn't happen very often, and when it does you could copy the bootloader as well. Probably each OS should have a copy of it, for recovery purposes.

So now your computer needs to figure out if it should boot the bootloader either from firmware OR from disk. How should it know that? What would be a 100% reliable way to determine this?

And if there is a conflict (because now there can be conflicts. Oh boy!)... How should it be resolved?

Again, this is a source of even more complexity. All in the name of the "simple" solution you wanted. Just because a few MBs on disk.

Can't you see where this is heading? Do you really think this is worth all that extra bullshit?

While UEFI is clearly over-engineered in many aspects, what you're asking for is under-engineering. And we all know that leads to nasty stuff down the road too.

>So now your computer needs to figure out if it should boot the bootloader either from firmware OR from disk.

That's not what I wrote, pls read again.

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