[COFF] [TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Moving to COFF ....

On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 10:58 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> As much as I don't care for Forth, man do I wish it had become the standard
> for boot proms, it might not be my cup of tea but I could make it do what
> I needed it to do.

Amen bro...  Sun did a nice job on that.   Although the Alpha Boot ROMs
were pretty good too. At least they were UNIX like and were extensible like
the Sun boot ROMs.   HP's were better than a PC BIOS, but they were pretty
awful.




> Can't say the same for UEFI, I disable that crap.
>
Well, it beats the crap out of IBM's BIOS, but that bar is very low.    UEFI
was sort of a 'camel' (a horse designed by committee) and too many people
peed on it.  Intel created EFI to try to fix BIOS and then people went
nuts.   Apple's version is the best of them, but as you say, they all suck
if you have seen anything better.  A big problem IMO is that EFI tried to
be somewhat compatible.  In the end, they were not, so you got the worst of
both (new interfaces and legacy functionality).

Server systems that support IPMT have Minux under the covers in
coprocessor, which using a coprocessor is also how Apple runs UEFI.  With
IMPT, it is sort of sad more of it is not really exposed, but you need the
added cost of the coprocessor.    Plus it adds a new security domain, which
many people complain about.   I try to know as little about it as possible
to get my work done, but exposing more of that interface might help.
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