[GTALUG] MBR and GTP Drives

[David Collier-Brown]

On 08/10/17 12:47 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> There are two ways of booting a PC.
>
> - old-style Master Boot Record: the BIOS loads the first sector of the
>    drive and then jumps to it, in 8086 mode.  Everything that happens
>    from there depends on the contents of the disk, not the firmware.
>    (Except that the BIOS supports 8086-mode calls into the BIOS
>    routines.)
>
> - new-style UEFI booting.  The firmware *does* understand the
>    partitioning and certain filesystems, enabling it to load and run
>    64-bit programs, and those programs can use the UEFI-defined
>    routines provided by the firmware.  Those programs reside in an EFI
>    System Partition
>
> Most motherboards sold as components (as opposed to coming within a
> computer) support both these days.
Slightly off-topic, Dave Taht pointed me to the NERF project
https://schd.ws/hosted_files/ossna2017/91/Linuxcon%202017%20NERF.pdf

It's purpose is to avoid attack vectors using EFI, the management engine 
and system management mode.

If you can boot from MBR, /do/.

--dave


-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain

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