Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

My favourite pet peeves that i love to complain about (repeatedly):

- The GPT partition scheme inherited mixed-endianness UUID from Windows 3.1. Some people argue it does not qualify as mixed-endianness, but it is the struct from Windows 3.1 and its not evident from a printed UUID whether it is the Windows format or Big Endian as the standard says.

- Default file system for EFI is FAT, which was originally made for floppies and 8.3 filenames. Everything above 32MB and 11-byte filenames is hacked on top. There were a ton of competing, incompatible implementations until the Microsoft Extensible Firmware Initiative standardized it. FAT should deserve a long list on its own.

- EFI binaries are Windows PE executables, and PE executables are starting with the MS-DOS MZ header as introduced with MS-DOS 3 (or was it 2?). The "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" header.

From an osdev perspective, EFI is hideous. Good luck implementing that stuff for your own OS.

For secureboot: On one side i hope that Microsoft gets hacked and their EFI signing key leaked, on the other side i'm confident this has already happened.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: