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the_panopticon | on: First steps in bare-metal programming using UEFI
For "Get used to the lack of a C standard library" mentioned in https://kevinboone.me/efitest4.html there's always https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-libc.

And on "Be aware of the Windows-ness of EFI" commentary the resemblance to Windows coding style https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb... is no accident. We leveraged this coding methodology as we evolved the original Intel Boot Initiative then EFI and then UEFI code and specification https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

PerryStyle | parent | next
There's also https://libc.llvm.org/uefi/index.html, but not sure if it's still receiving updates.
FuriouslyAdrift | parent | next
Be aware EDK II has a recent severe CVE to watch out for.

https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2026-97631

ktm5j | root | parent
That's just in the PXE driver AFAIK.. shouldn't be an issue here.
kragen | parent
I think "leveraged this coding methodology" is an unjustifiably positive way to describe the results of the process. I think "spread this disease" would be more accurate. UTF-16 strings, really? VFAT? PE32+ is maybe justifiable (I'd prefer ELF, but that's because it's more familiar, not because it's actually better), but VFAT? And even in 01998 it should have been apparent that UTF-16 was not a sane format for strings, much less in 02005 when the EFI → UEFI transition happened.

To me, UEFI is like "leveraging the waste disposal methodology" of dumping your toxic waste in a lake. Yes, it's more convenient for you, but it does lasting damage and causes years of suffering for millions of people; and eventually somebody else has to clean up your mess, at far greater cost than if you'd just done something sensible to begin with.

I could probably say the same thing about X-Windows.

doublepg23 | root | parent | next
I've never _actually_ implemented a filesystem, but when researching OS dev it seemed like FAT32 was pretty close to what you'd write as a minimum viable filesystem while being a very well known quantity.
kragen | root | parent
Yes, I think that's a fair assessment, although the fractal of stupid runs deep in FAT32: a separate 5-bit field for seconds within a minute? Separate fixed-width fields for filename and extension? A 4 GiB file size limit?

But, although FAT32 does indeed have the virtue of relative simplicity, that's no excuse for VFAT.

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hmry | root | parent
In the eternal words of the Microsoft Game Development Kit docs[0], "Windows operates natively in UTF-16 [...]. This is a unique burden that Windows places on code that targets multiple platforms."

I wonder when Microsoft will stop being a "UTF-16 house" adding UTF-16 to new projects... They did it again to LSP, and that was in 2016. Maybe by 2045 Microsoft will use UTF-8 for new projects, and then by 2100 we can switch to UTF-8 by default.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/docs/gdk-dev/ov...

tredre3 | root | parent
> They did it again to LSP, and that was in 2016.

That one is explainable by the fact that it was developed for VS Code, a typescript/javascript project. Javascript uses UTF-16 for strings (for historical reasons unrelated to Microsoft, though they are the same reasons that made MS use UCS-2 during the same time period).

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