Re:Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
by StillBored on Thursday April 21, 2022 @01:34PM
(#31112589)
Well splitting hairs, it mandates that everyone support FAT, individual system+OS vendors can add their own filesystems, but then its vendor lock.
So, just do FAT and be done with it. Adding other filesystems is just a waste of time because the ESP only needs to store a half dozen files or so.
13.3.1.1: "The EFI firmware must support the FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 variants of the EFI file system"
Re:Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
by babypuncher on Thursday April 21, 2022 @01:45PM
(#31112753)
I think FAT is a fair baseline. It can be implemented in a few dozen lines of code. Support for it is ubiquitous. It is not encumbered by any active patents. All the alternatives I have seen proposed are both considerably more complex and not ubiquitously supported.
Of course, pretty much all EFI implementations only support FAT, so it's a bit of a moot point; the only one I'm aware of that supports anything else is the one on Intel Macs, which also understands HFS+.
You can find a huge selection of EFI filesystem drivers at https://efi.akeo.ie/ but they're derived from GRUB and hence GPL, so don't expect the likes of American Megatrends to be bundling these any time soon.