boot the kernel directly from firmware with UEFI?

[Tom H]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 3:52 AM, thufir <hawat.thufir at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Dec 2016 03:44:50 -0500, Tom H wrote:
>>>
>>> Most of what I read at:
>>>
>>> http://superuser.com/posts/1113787/revisions
>>>
>>> is over my head. But what are the ramifications to eliminating GRUB?
>>> Obviously that's just one less component to maintain for developers.
>>
>> I assume that you mean eliminate grub for efi.
>>
>> If you eliminate grub, you either have to set up every kernel/boot in
>> the firmware with efibootmgr (which can a PitA) or you have to use a
>> boot manager like systemd-bootx64.efi that'll give you a grub-like boot
>> menu without the entire grub infrastructure.
>
> Heh, I was trying to see the upside to UEFI. Beyond large discs there
> doesn't seem to be much gain. It's interesting, though.

The advantage isn't large disks; you can use large disks with bios and
gpt labels.

The advantage is that you don't have to rely on an embedded
bootloader. The firmware locates the ESP, reads its fat filesystem,
and loads an efi executable whether it's a kernel, a bootmanager, or a
bootloader.