On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre@archlinux.de> wrote:

Am 21.06.2013 11:52, schrieb Tobias Powalowski:

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Hi, my plan for this release will be to replace the syslinux package with syslinux-bios and package the efi part as syslinux-efi package. This will be like the grub packages.

Cant we just use one package? Unless this is required by upstream (e.g. conflicting file names) I would not split this. The grub packages are a mess.

+1 on that. I read the message from Keshav and also discussed a bit with him online. This is my take on the situation: There is no need to split up the syslinux package at all (nor grub for that matter) except if we want to support running 32-bit kernel together with 64-bit efi. We don't want to do that as, to the best of my knowledge, on any machine with 64-bit efi one can also use a 64-bit kernel, so I don't think this case is worth taking into consideration. Moreover, I think that using a different arch in the firmware and the kernel is not a good idea in general (even with 32-bit efi and 64-bit kernel, which in principle could boot). Unless the situation has changed, the kernel will apparently not be able to speak with the firmware after boot [0]. I dropped cross-arch support from gummiboot some time ago, and never heard a complaint. I suggest we do that everywhere, unless anyone can show a use-case where it is needed, and actually works as expected. Cheers, Tom [0]: <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=746421#c1> (thanks to Keshav for the reference).