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

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I seem to recall reading that certain implementations of UEFI would die
| if you wrote to the nvram too many times.  Updating boot entries in UEFI
| each time you upgrade the kernel might be a bad idea in that case.

Really?  That's terrible.  I often update UEFI settings.

Do you have a source for this?

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

| > Apparently Microsoft dictated that if you wish to be considered
| > Windows-ready, you must not ship with the UEFI shell.
| 
| Yes amazingly stupid to mandate one of the most convinient repair tools
| isn't allowed on the system.

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

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.

(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.)