New UEFI guide on the wiki

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 4, 2014, at 11:03 AM, Andrew Lutomirski <luto at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>
>> /boot is useful regardless of how you boot.  The ESP doesn't need to
>> be very large and doesn't cause any harm if booted via BIOS.  The BIOS
>> Boot partition only needs to be ~64kB IIRC, and UEFI boot will happily
>> ignore it.  You don't even need to have any contents in there.
>
> GRUB devs want 1MB for BIOS Boot. And then it also maintains 1MB alignment. Nevertheless one Kleenex is more valuable than 1MB of drive space, even on an SSD.
>
>
>
>> IMO in an ideal world, there would be one (or zero!) copy of the
>> bootloader config, and the default configuration of the bootloader
>> would populate the ESP (with the signed shim!), the BIOS Boot
>> partition, and the (fake) MBR in the first sector.  That way the disk
>> would *always* be BIOS-bootable and, as long as there's a (working)
>> copy of efibootmgr around, you can make the system UEFI-bootable with
>> a single command that doesn't write to disk.
>
> I'm not opposed to the layout, but I'm personally totally disinterested in the ensuing clusterf|ck experiences I've already had with UEFI+BIOS dual boot OS's. If I could only experience food poisoning instead, my disposition would be no worse for the wear.

That's okay.  I can deal with the clusterfsck all on my own, as long
as other things don't get in the way unnecessarily. :)

>
> My opinion: anything that requires BIOS to boot is old, or it's broken. And if it's old, it should be put into a VM. And if it's broken it should be fixed if it isn't a bad idea from the outset.
>
>
>
>> Everyone wins.  Especially people who install via UEFI, upgrade their
>> BIOS, and go "oh sh*t" when the BIOS upgrade conveniently erases their
>> boot entry.
>
> Let's agree to not equate UEFI and BIOS. There is nothing basic about UEFI.

Touché!

--Andy