[ale] UEFI vs BIOS understanding

[David Jackson]

>> Does gpt require efi??

>No.  That was just a line in the sand for MS-Windows.

Okay, this is probably what I'm missing.  I'm confusing politics with
engineering!

> I've been using GPT boot HDDs for about 10 yrs with legacy, no UEFI,
booting. Only my laptop uses UEFI today. Everything else uses the old BIOS
boot method.

Okay, this is probably it.  It looks like GPT came out in the late 1990s.
So I just looked at the Wikipedia article for GUID partition tables.  It
starts off the second paragraph:

snip>>

All modern personal computer operating systems
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system> support GPT. Some,
including macOS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS> and Microsoft Windows
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows> on the x86 architecture,
support booting from GPT partitions only on systems with EFI firmware, but
FreeBSD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD> and most Linux distributions
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution> can boot from GPT
partitions on systems with either firmware interface: the legacy BIOS or
the modern EFI.
<<snip

So perhaps the reason my sgdisk commands (for creating a GUID partition
table) didn't work with that ASUS bios didn't have to do with the bios
itself.  There might have been some other reason why that partition system
failed on those installation attempts.

>Plus, isn't the EFI support in hypervisors a little flaky?

Good question.  I've only been using Virtualbox from the latest Arch linux,
and I've only been working on this installation script for a couple of
months.  I haven't noticed any obvious flakiness.  What kind of flakiness
would you be on the look out for?

On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 12:46 PM DJ-Pfulio via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> On 12/20/20 12:29 PM, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> > Does gpt require efi??
>
> No.  That was just a line in the sand for MS-Windows.  I've been using GPT
> boot HDDs for about 10 yrs with legacy, no UEFI, booting. Only my laptop
> uses UEFI today. Everything else uses the old BIOS boot method.  Plus,
> isn't the EFI support in hypervisors a little flaky?
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