[systemd-devel] [PATCH 1/2] systemctl: Add reboot to firmware support

[Jan Janssen]

Dimitri John Ledkov <dimitri.j.ledkov <at> intel.com> writes:

> Both gummyboot and grub-efi have a menu option to reboot into
> firmware, is that not enough? Why do we need to have it from userspace
> / the booted system?
> 

There can be plenty of reasons why the firmware won't provide you with an
option. One of them being a FastBoot implementation that doesn't initialize
USB input devices. And also, if one were to directly boot from the efi stub
without boot loader (and not getting 5000€ in the process).

But this is primarily a reason of convenience. If your bootloader doesn't
give you a boot to firmware option, or your bootloader is being annoying and
boots to your OS faster than you can interface with it, you're currently out
of luck. I'm not too sure, but grub-efi probably even requires you to
actually specifically create the entry in the configuration; and touching
the grub config is just plain annoying. Especially if you just want that
entry for the one time EFI setup every once in a blue moon.

Also, the fact that there have been people asking questions about how to get
to the EFI/BIOS has always been there. With this you can just tell them to
"systemctl --firmware reboot" on any modern computer and be done with it.

Jan