Schol-R-LEA wrote:
I had something a bit more immediate in mind: a first-stage boot loader designed for a BIOS system loading from a floppy will be different from one loading from a fixed drive, which in turn would differ from one booting from an El Torito CD
Ok, maybe for floppies, but if you move them out of the equation to solely rely on LBA, all the rest can use the same boot record (see my bootloader's boot.asm).
Schol-R-LEA wrote:
A BIOS system boots in a different way from a UEFI system, which realistically doesn't really need a first-stage loader at all in most cases, but does have its own way of interfacing with the kernel which the kernel needs to know about and handle sensibly. That sort of thing.
First part is true, but the second isn't. You can write a bunch of bootloaders in a way that they interface with the kernel exactly the same way, therefore the kernel doesn't need to know about the firmware at all. Actually that's the whole point of BOOTBOOT Protocol. Write your kernel once, and don't care on which platform it's booted on and how. (Being binary compatible on platforms with the same CPU, and source compatible for platforms with different CPUs.)
Schol-R-LEA wrote:
I also favor source-based package management (in principle) for much the same reason, despite the fact that none of the existing ones are really usable (which is why I switched from Gentoo to Manjaro for my preferred Linux distro), so perhaps I am the crazy one here (I mean, I am crazy anyway, but... you know what I mean).
Nope, I totally agree with you. And I also had to gave up on Gentoo, a change in emerge created a circular dependency hell with fast Furier transformation library. And I said: a) why on earth does a package manager need fast Furier transform in the first place? b) if I have to reinstall my entire system because of this stupid issue, do I really want to go with Gentoo again? Which is sad, because when there was no issues with emerge I really really liked that distro. It was comfortable (for me) and everything run lightning fast, perfectly tuned to my computer. Booted in less than a sec from turn on to X11 logon
Do that with Bugbuntu!
Cheers,
bzt