[Oberon] UEFI

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 at 16:47, Paul Reed <paulreed at paddedcell.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Liam,
>
> Do you mean UEFI, or Secure Boot? I'm interested (and in raising the
> tone a bit). ;-)

:-)

I really do mean UEFI. Even with Secure Boot off, which is broadly
necessary for any FOSS OS without a large budget behind it (to pay for
signing of bootloader binaries).

There seems to be, from my own experience so far, 3 or 4 types of UEFI
system in practice:

[1] UEFI systems where you can pick an option to work in legacy BIOS
emulation, and then all the UEFI stuff disappears and it just looks
and acts like a BIOS. Example: my Thinkpad X220 & T420 even on the
latest firmware. You can enter the firmware with whatever the
manufacturer's normal hot-key combination is, etc.

[2] UEFI systems which will look for legacy BIOS boot structures on
the boot medium, load from them in BIOS mode and from then look like a
BIOS machine. However, this is dynamic and if booted from a UEFI
medium with an EFI System Partition etc., they act like pure UEFI
machines. Examples: I have seen some fairly recent (Xeon) desktop
Dells from the last 3-5 years like this.

[3] UEFI systems which offer a choice: for instance, when you enter
the "select a boot medium" menu, and they detect a bootable USB , then
you get 2 boot options for that medium: "legacy boot" or "BIOS boot"
or words to that effect, or "UEFI boot". Depending on which you pick,
the *same boot medium* will perceive itself to be starting on a BIOS
system or on a UEFI system. If you know the difference, these are
easy, but it's easy to get it wrong and enter a config where you can't
install a bootable system, or your booted system can't see or
manipulate the boot structures of an installed system of the _other_
type.

Examples: I have seen modern 2019-model Dell Precision mobile
workstations like this; my girlfriend's Lenovo Core i5 desktop (about
a 2017-2018 machine).

Interestingly, I was only able to get my partner's machine to boot
Linux Mint 19.2 or 19.3 from its HD by pressing F12 to pick  a boot
medium; then the GRUB menu appears. Normally, it boots direct to
Win10, whatever settings are in the firmware. (This is based on Ubuntu
18.04, as mainstream as Linux gets). Upgrading the firmware made no
difference.

Interestingly, this summer, when I upgraded to Mint 20 (based on
Ubuntu 20.04-1), suddenly the EFI GRUB menu started working without
F12. Someone somewhere has fixed something and now it works. Who knows
who or what? All part of the fun of UEFI.

[4] UEFI systems which are pure UEFI and will only boot from a
correct-configured UEFI medium. Some may _say_ that there is a legacy
boot option but it won't work. Example: my current work desktop, a
Dell Precision Core i7 minitower. I inherited this from a colleague
who quit. He spent days trying to get it to boot. Later, I tried to
help. When he left, I asked for and got the machine, and I spent a
week or so on it. I tried about 6-7 Linux distros, stable and
cutting-edge versions, booted from USB or DVD or network. Nothing
worked. I could not get a Linux distro to boot from the hard disk. In
the end, in desperation, I put the latest Win10 on it, which worked
perfectly. With the boot structures created by Win10, Linux will
dual-boot perfectly happily and totally reliably.

I have received a lot of abuse from "experts" who tell me that what
I've seen is impossible, not true, etc. Especially from enterprise
Linux vendors, who just get their bootloader signed and therefore see
no problem with this. This is a theme -- I've been in the business 32
years now and I've had that a lot. One exception disproves a million
people for whom something works perfectly.

IMHO, UEFI is inadequately-specified, as of yet poorly-debugged, and
is not yet really ready for prime time. It works with single-boot
Windows systems, although it is hard to do things like change boot
settings, and it's relatively easy to get an unbootable system if you,
for instance, copy a working HDD install onto an SSD. Fixing this is a
lot of work and the automated tools in Win10 don't work, which
indicates to me that Microsoft don't fully understand this either.
There is no longer any consistent way to get into the firmware setup
program, into Windows' Safe Mode etc. Many systems intentionally
conceal all this to make a smoother customer experience. You need to
do things like set options in a Windows control panel to display the
startup options when the system is next booted. If you can't load
Windows, tough. If you can but it fails to complete boot, tough. If
you don't have a Windows system, tough. I regard this as broken, badly
broken; the industry apparently does not.

It is important to note, not as paranoia but as a simple statement of
fact, that enterprise OS vendors focus  on servers, and servers
typically do not dual-boot, at all, ever. Most, in fact, run inside
dedicated VMs, so they don't even interact with other OSes at all.
Therefore all this stuff is poorly-debugged and little-tested.

It is also significant, I think, in paranoid mode, that while
Microsoft _says_ it loves Linux and FOSS now, this is marketing guff.
No significant parts of Windows have been made FOSS. Windows will not
dual-boot with any FOSS OS; in fact it disables other bootloaders. It
is entirely the FOSS OS's job. Windows can't mount, read, or write
Linux filesystems, or even identify them. MS only likes Linux if it's
running  safely inside a Windows VM.

This, for me, falsifies the claim that MS <3 FOSS. They talk the talk
but do not walk the walk. It is their old embrace and extend tactic
once again.

As such, the fact that UEFI works so badly with non-MS OSes seems
likely to be quite intentional to me, and that it only cooperates with
big enterprise server OS vendors. The situation is difficult for small
FOSS players and not materially improving.

> If contemporary UEFI is not a reasonable target for any 3rd-party
> operating systems, such as Oberon, then of course we should know sooner
> rather than later, and not waste our time (or money) with such hardware
> anymore - since there are, as you say, plenty of choices these days.

I hesitate to make any blanket statements.

The Oberon community needs to try to ensure that Native Oberon and/or
A2 continue to work on vanilla PC hardware. Insisting on obsolete
tech, e.g. insisting on a BIOS machine, is not a viable strategy.
Requesting at least working legacy boot and supporting a legacy boot
structure on the HDD, as a temporary minimum, is doable.

However, hard disks of over 2TB are now cheap commodity kit. Such
drives mandate GPT partitioning. GPT is poorly supported on legacy
BIOSes and really is designed to work with UEFI. So the work of
providing a UEFI bootloader for Oberon or A2, even if it requires
Secure Boot to be disabled, is probably inevitable.

-- 
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