Ground-truth doc for UEFI?

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PeterX
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Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2019 5:46 am

Ground-truth doc for UEFI?

Post by PeterX »

We already have this:

https://wiki.osdev.org/Broken_UEFI_implementations
And we have (scattered over the forum) infos about UEFI bugs (in Qemu and in hardware) like getting video mode working only after setting the mode.

Wouldn't it be cool to have all this info in one page.

I'm thinking of something like this:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4532
And that is a bad, bad mistake. The result is often code that sort of worked, once, but is buggy and unmaintainable because nobody actually remembers what their assumptions were at the time it was written. They’re baked into code in cryptic ways, and trying to fix problems is terrifying because it’s so hard to tell when a change will break an undocumented assumption.

There is way to avoid this kind of mess. It’s to write down your assumptions before you write code, and treat that document as the authority of which the code is an implementation.
Greetings
Peter
testjz
Posts: 23
Joined: Thu Aug 20, 2020 6:11 am

Re: Ground-truth doc for UEFI?

Post by testjz »

I think that the best we can do about this is to add all the reported UEFI bugs to the wiki page you linked to. In addition to that, one of us could maybe even maintain a plain-text file and update it weekly, so that everyone can download and view it with a standard text editor. Unfortunately, I don't have time to search the forums for reports of UEFI bugs and also I don't know of any UEFI bugs, so I can't help here. But I'll try to remember this topic if I find something relevant.

Apart from UEFI bugs, there also are CPU bugs, bootloader bugs, compiler bugs, and also stuff that is different per implementation but can't be classified as a bug. It would be nice if we could somehow put all of this information on the wiki.
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