this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
45 points (92.5% liked)
Linux
48181 readers
1167 users here now
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.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
that is what they teach us in computing lessons lol
thanks for the explanation