this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Early true BIOSen were stored on EPROM, which couldn't be rewritten while on the board, so those were read-only.

Later BIOSen were often on EEPROM or other chips that could be reflashed while on the board. According to Wikipedia, that started in the mid-1990s. However, you usually needed physical access and/or special software tools to do an overwrite—you couldn't mount these as a filesystem.

UEFI is quite different from legacy BIOSen and can be mounted as a filesystem, but how much it can be tampered with varies between implementations and devices.

So you would have been correct up until about 30 years ago, but not for modern systems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

thanks for the explanation

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

that is what they teach us in computing lessons lol