Many people still install Linux from CDs. But a growing number install from USB. In an ideal world you’d be able to download one image that would let you do either, but it turns out that that’s quite difficult. Shockingly enough, it’s another situation where the system firmware exists to make your life difficult.
Booting a hard drive is pretty easy. The BIOS reads the first 512 bytes off the drive, copies them to RAM and executes them. That code is then responsible for either starting your bootloader or identifying the currently active partition and jumping to its boot sector, but before too long you’re in a happy place where you’re executing whatever you want to. Life is good. So you’d think that CDs would work in a similar way. The ISO 9660 format even leaves a whole 32KB at the start of a filesystem, which is enough space for a pretty awesome bootloader. But no. This is not how CDs work. That would be far too easy.
via mjg59 – Further adventures in EFI booting. Stand back, we’re about to go down the rabbit hole.