Re:“Last Mile” Barriers to Removing Legacy BIOS [pdf]
by wolfgke on Saturday November 18, 2017 @09:46PM
(#15731975)
> I recently suffered through a firmware update done via the UEFI command line, and it was incredibly painful. Every time I need to use the UEFI command line (normally for a firmware update) I want to scream.
What was so painful about updating the firmware via the UEFI Shell? I do/did it all the time this way for the diverse Minnowboard variants and cannot claim that it was painful.
Re:“Last Mile” Barriers to Removing Legacy BIOS [pdf]
by drewg123 on Sunday November 19, 2017 @08:07AM
(#15733755)
In general, because the EFI shell sucks and was designed by committee. On a machine with 36 disk drives, it was not easy to find the drive with the UEFI partition that held the firmware update. That's why I mentioned SRM -- the firmware updater built into SRM would try all the drives attached to the system.
BTW, Don't forget about DEC's "SRM" firmware, that was quite nice. It was simpler than open firmware, and made a hell of a lot more sense than uefi. After almost 15 years away from DEC alphas, I still remember most of the commands. SRM's "lfu" beats the hell out of EFI updaters I've used. And I fondly recall that you could break into the SRM and look at the current value of registers, and even (if you were running DEC Unix) force a crashdump. Kind of like ddb on FreeBSD, but built into the firmware.