Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk

Re:Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hack... by blueflow on Friday September 29, 2023 @04:05AM (#37700673)

> GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

Normally you have GRUB being launched from EFI to avoid dealing with the legacy parts of EFI directly.

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Re:Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hack... by dale_glass on Friday September 29, 2023 @04:35AM (#37700897)

I mean, most of what GRUB provides is completely unnecessary under EFI.

You can even boot Linux from EFI directly, I think, you just need to hardcode the kernel parameters, which is not ideal. So a very minimal loader is still useful, but way simpler than GRUB.

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Re:Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hack... by blueflow on Friday September 29, 2023 @05:10AM (#37701131)

But you have to implement GPT with its mixed-endian UUID's (standard-nonconformance copied from Win 3.1), link the kernel into a windows executable (Which is hacked on top of a MS-DOS MZ .exe) and write that to the ESP, which is a floppy file system from the 80ies. And of course its relying on the VFAT extensions from windows 95.

I don't know how Microsoft managed to design a boot scheme that is conceptually better than boot sector booting while including a similar painful amount of legacy in it.

And then there are the people who celebrate that 'advance' of modern software while their kernel now has a 16-bit real mode "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" stub.

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