[Oberon] UEFI

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2020 at 22:51, Michael Schierl <schierlm at gmx.de> wrote:

> Second, buggy implementations. I am currently writing this email on my
> old notebook (ThinkPad L530 bought in 2013) where I know that if I boot
> certain UEFI bootloaders (in UEFI mode) and then without a complete
> power down boot any BIOS bootloader, my BIOS memory map will reserve
> about a dozen megabytes more for "System reserved". Persistently. This
> went as far as that I had almost 1.5 GB memory "lost", until I was able
> to track it down and fix it (see https://superuser.com/a/762823/1724 for
> the gory details if you are interested).

That is absolutely amazing, and horrific. Great troubleshooting!

> As a person who implemented several tools for UEFI, both loaders that
> are booted via UEFI as well as command line tools for the UEFI shell,
> both on free software (using GNU EFI) and on Visual Studio, I have to
> admit that the programming model of EFI is a lot cleaner than the old
> BIOS model, and the quirks needed to work around firmware bugs are less
> numerous (but also less well documented).
>
> So I would say, that supporting UEFI is not less reasonable than
> supporting the legacy "IBM-compatible" BIOS target.

I have read that it is possible to write small apps that run directly
in UEFI, including in FreePascal:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/hwenablement_uefi_for_dummies/attachments/slides/2381/export/events/attachments/hwenablement_uefi_for_dummies/slides/2381/Programming_UEFI_For_Dummies.pdf

There are tutorials etc:

https://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-programming/hello.html

https://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI_App_Bare_Bones

Do you know what would get the attention of the world to turn on Oberon?

If someone ported the native x86 version of Oberon to run entirely
from UEFI. Compile the entire OS into a single binary that didn't boot
from hard disk, but actually fit inside the EFI System Partition as a
single file and booted and ran straight from there, without a disk
partition.

The average ESP is 500MB or more. Plenty of room for Oberon, I'd think.

It's probably the only remotely modern OS in the world that could fit
and could do this.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053