[GTALUG] long war story: growing the ESP (/boot/efi)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 10:21:07AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> Really?  That's terrible.  I often update UEFI settings.
> 
> Do you have a source for this?

I can't find any.  There was a bug that made NVRAM read only on some
systems in 2017 (that was in ubuntu 17.10), but nothing else I can find.
I can find some comments about trying to reduce the writes to NVRAM to
avoid wear, but nothing specific I can find that actually says people
have had NVRAM actually wear out.  It would have been some years ago.

> (Updating Windows, without making it the default boot, is really
> annoying.)

Hmm, I seem to recall newer windows versions have been better behaved
than they used to be.

> What do you find it useful for?  I've not really missed it.  When
> things get sticky, I boot Linux from a USB stick.

Well being able to just go in an launch grub or something can be handy.
Also firmware update tools for some network cards can be run from UEFI
which avoids needing to install special drivers or windows.

> Where do you get a .efi for the UEFI shell?  Some place that you trust.
> (Building it myself seems like too much effort.)
> 
> An unexplored niche: an enhanced UEFI shell.

I have only ever used the built in one on servers and some embedded
systems.

> (The only time I considered programming for the EFI environment was
> when I found a couple of cheap Win 10 devices with too small eMMC.
> There was no room for Linux without ditching Windows.  They could not
> boot from the SD card interface.  With a .efi SD driver, grub would be
> able to boot off the SD card.)

-- 
Len Sorensen