Linux

48323 readers

789 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

167

How would Linux have been today if locked bootloaders were as common in the 90s as they are now on ARM devices? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Basically the title

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I wonder what the newest PC motherboard with the BIOS ROM in a socketed DIP chip is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

At least a decade old, if not more than.

If you wanted to swap your vendor EFI image to something else, at this point it's all going to be via a SPI programmer, and if you own one of the two boards that it supports, coreboot/openboot.

But, essentially, you can't swap because there's very little supported hardware, and thus are stuck with your vendor proprietary EFI.

What's hilarious, I guess? is that the EFI setup is more or less it's own OS that can then chainboot an OS which is how the mid90s workstations (Sun, SGI, HP, etc.) worked.