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The real energy behind ACPI was Intel, not Microsoft - Intel ironically wanted an instruction-set neutral firmware glue given that they were splitting their efforts between Itanium and x86. And Intel is pretty pro-linux.

There's much worse in UEFI - UEFI, while a lot better than the awful real-mode boot process that came before it, actually requires building Windows PE executables and dlls, even for a linux system. And the sky didn't fall.

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Fully agreed on the horribleness of real-mode (BIOS) boot, but for others it might be interesting to know why: It was made to boot a relatively simple 16bit computer with a pretty limited configuration space ("do you have two floppy drives or one[1], and do you have the monochrome MDA graphics adapter or the unprofessional 4-color CGA one?").

And then continued to be bolted on, not only by the PCs BIOS but also by the possibility to have secondary boot ROMs on extension cards, over 30 years later.

[1] Call it paraphrasing, as I don't remember right now whether you could even boot from the 2nd floppy drive.

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