On 08/10/17 12:47 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
There are two ways of booting a PC.
- old-style Master Boot Record: the BIOS loads the first sector of the
drive and then jumps to it, in 8086 mode. Everything that happens
from there depends on the contents of the disk, not the firmware.
(Except that the BIOS supports 8086-mode calls into the BIOS
routines.)
- new-style UEFI booting. The firmware *does* understand the
partitioning and certain filesystems, enabling it to load and run
64-bit programs, and those programs can use the UEFI-defined
routines provided by the firmware. Those programs reside in an EFI
System Partition
Most motherboards sold as components (as opposed to coming within a
computer) support both these days.
Slightly off-topic, Dave Taht pointed me to the NERF project
https://schd.ws/hosted_files/ossna2017/91/Linuxcon%202017%20NERF.pdf
It's purpose is to avoid attack vectors using EFI, the management engine
and system management mode.
If you can boot from MBR, /do/.
--dave
--
David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
[email protected] | -- Mark Twain
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