[PLUG] Booting, UEFI, BIOS

[George Zipperlen <george.zipperlen@mail.com>]

I'm sorry that I couldn't make it to PLUG Central this week, and thus 
missed the talk on "Bootable UEFI Flash Drives" by LeRoy Cressy.

I have recently acquired a used laptop that allows you to choose either 
UEFI or Legacy (BIOS) to boot.

2 quick questions:

1) Which boot method should I choose?  Both BIOS and UEFI involve a 
learning curve for me.  

2) If I choose UEFI, will it make USB sticks or CD/DVD with the old  
boot method unbootable?  I'd like to be able to boot SystemRescueCD
when all else fails.  This may be a stupid question, but I don't 
really understand the modern boot process. 

More details.  It is a Dell Inspiron 15. I have successfully booted 
various OS's on it from USB sticks and CD/DVD drive, and everything 
seems to work ok, disk totally wiped, no partitions. 

My current plan is to run FreeBSD as the (only) booted OS, using the 
ZFS file system.  I see no need for other disk partitions in these 
days of 100Gigabyte to Terabyte HDDs and cheap USB sticks for file 
transfer. I may be wrong on this?

I can then run other OSs, including various flavors of Linux in virtual 
machines (bhyve). I think a hypervisor is better for my purposes then 
a container.  I want to learn Linux, and play with things like Plan9 / 
Inferno, and also access legacy systems like DomainOS in  MAME/MESS 
emulator.

I'm choosing FreeBSD because I believe that the kernel is lighter weight (?) 
but mostly because it is more like the systems on which I learned Unix in 
user space, admin space, and kernel.  

PLUGs collective wisdom eagerly anticipated,

-- 
George Zipperlen

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