grub-pc versus grub-efi-amd64

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2020 at 14:59, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de> wrote:

> It occured to me, too, that UEFI under Linux is a mess. Now, this
> explains it...

IMHO, it really is.

When I state this, I often get shouted at, usually by people who are
not really responding to what I am saying.

Yes, the BIOS was obsolete; yes, x86-64 needed a better replacement;
yes, EFI was a standard for Itanium and Intel Macs and enhancing EFI
was one option, although there were others:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBIOS
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libreboot
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_U-Boot
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

But I have a machine (Lenovo minitower) which only enumerates the
loads in the EFI partition if you press F12 to list bootable devices;
otherwise, it only loads Windows. I have another machine (Dell
Precision) which cannot and will not boot Linux from its hard disk
unless Windows is present and has a boot loader in the EFI partition.
I have worked on others with other weirdnesses (Dell Precision
laptops, for example).

As usual, Thinkpads are about the least problematic, and have a BIOS
emulation mode that just works, and behaves exactly like a BIOS
machine, even with 4-5 different OSes installed. I have 1 Thinkpad
multi-booting IBM PC DOS 7.1, Haiku, A2/Bluebottle and Devuan. Another
currently has Win10, Ubuntu, Deepin and ZorinOS.

Enterprise Linux vendors see no problem, as they are happy to pay MS
or whoever to sign their bootloader binaries, so that UEFI in Secure
Boot mode will happily load them.

Linux distros not backed by a rich parent company, or no company at
all, have more difficulty. I also have a machine with MX Linux and
Windows Thin Client, for instance. I suspect that wouldn't work easily
with UEFI.

-- 
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