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Comment by als0 | Hacker News Reader

Why are you using legacy BIOS? It has been obsolete for a long time and is disappearing https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/intel-to-kill-off-th...

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This is like asking why do you prefer to start your engine with a key when we have buttons that scan your fingerprint and authenticate you with Apple?

If the BIOS is sufficient and simpler... why not?

You can't boot from NVMe with BIOS, not interested in running systems that don't boot off NVMe

I wonder why? I would expect that it is possible technically just that "the powers that be" made a policy decision not to allow it.

If it were possible would you use the BIOS?

There are a handful of drives that support booting via bios - Samsung 950 Pro is the most common.

I still haven't seen much compelling about UEFI. If the enduring standard of BIOS boot is no longer available, I guess that's compelling.

I can see that secure boot is compelling to the right audience, but it doesn't add much for me.

I guess the only other compelling thing is that UEFI works the same across multiple CPU architectures like x86, POWER and ARM64

Yeah, that's potentially compelling; if you've got UEFI enabled boards for those platforms. A quick search says maybe raspberry pi 4 supports uefi booting, which would be interesting.

All ARM64 servers use UEFI and any SystemReady compliant board too. Sadly no desktop computers yet.

I don't believe there are any POWER machines using UEFI. The standard POWER boot process uses OPAL (Open Power Abstraction Layer) instead. But POWER does use GPT disk partitioning, which is from the UEFI standard.

Someone has ported TianoCore to powerNV, but I've never looked into it. You could replace the hostboot payload with any binary, it's basically just an ELF file with a payload delivered, an initramfs in the case of skiboot/petitboot.

Not a lot of advantages in UEFI over petitboot, though.

Edit: here it is. https://github.com/andreiw/ppc64le-edk2 mocks the presence of ACPI tables using the equivalent OPAL calls.

> Why are you using legacy BIOS? It has been obsolete for a long time

It's simpler. That's sufficient reason for me.

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