On 10/15/2013 09:23 PM, Blibbet wrote: > > It seems silly to require that FAT lives on forever with UEFI, when > there are more native (and sometimes more secure) solutions for each OS. > Especialy given UEFI has a file system driver model.
Although some hardware is designed with a single OS in mind, many computers are OS-agnostic. If you buy a motherboard from MSI, ASUS, or whoever, or even if you buy a computer from Dell, HP, Apple, or whoever, you can load Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, or other OSes on it. Ripping out the EFI FAT driver and replacing it with a driver for NTFS, ext4fs, or some other OS-specific filesystem would just make it harder to use the computer with anything but the OS for which that filesystem was designed. Note that Apple's HFS+ EFI driver supplements, but does not replace, the FAT driver. If Apple had replaced the FAT driver with an HFS+ driver, it would have just made it harder to install other EFI-mode OSes on their hardware. FAT may be klunky, but it's the closest thing we've got to a cross-OS filesystem. Every major OS has FAT drivers, and can therefore be used to maintain an ESP. The ESP needn't be a big partition, and the benefit of advanced filesystem features on the ESP is limited at best, so FAT has the benefit of working and creating a minimal number of follow-on problems. > It would be nice if EDK included CD and DVD media file systems, at least > binaries like the FAT driver. There is an open source ISO-9660 driver for EFI, but it's licensed under the GPL. It began life as part of Christoph Pfisterer's rEFIt project (http://refit.sourceforge.net), but it wasn't really completed as part of that project. Oracle took it up and released a finished version as part of VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org). I also distribute a slightly modified version of this driver with rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/). Because it's GPLed, the Oracle ISO-9660 driver can't be folded back into the EDK 2. (It was GPLed by Oracle before I touched it, so there's nothing I can do about that.) That said, Pfisterer wrote a bunch of common support files that are now used by about half a dozen drivers (including the ISO-9660 driver), and Pfisterer's original versions of these files, as well as his original fsw_iso9660.c file, all use the BSD license. If you wanted to use these rEFIt files as a starting point for an ISO-9660 driver for the EDK2, you probably could do so. (IANAL, though, so check the license information in each file and consult a lawyer if you think it's necessary.) Oracle slapped GPL notices in some of its files, and the versions I use in rEFInd are based on these, so most of the VirtualBox and rEFInd files should not be used as a basis for an EDK2 driver. -- Rod Smith [email protected] http://www.rodsbooks.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60135031&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ edk2-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/edk2-devel
