On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Corrado Primier <ilbardo@gmail.com> wrote:
2013/1/5 Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked@gmail.com>
Does anyone have experience with such a UEFI system on this list?
I've got a 2008 Macbook (currently my primary mobile system) running. After the initial learning curve (it's quite more complex than traditional MBR/BIOS systems) I find I like it.
Just a caveat: if you have an nVidia card pay attention to the driver you want to use, nouveau gets a video memory corruption and freezes the system at boot (nomodeset is an option, but you have no X server). The proprietary driver works but... well... it's proprietary, and on some hardware revisions has bugs (on my 9400M it breaks the VTs as soon as X starts).
C
Thanks Corrado - the system I am planning actually doesn't have an Nvidia graphics card - it is pure Intel (HD 2500) onboard graphics. From what I have read it will hopefully play nicely with EFI but I am certainly still reading lots! I have all the hardware bits in a pile and once I know which way I am going then I will take an evening out to put the hardware together and then play (!) with the boot process - it is quite exciting to be at the cutting edge - though of course a little nerve racking too! I guess since it is a brand new system if it turns out that there are problems with it under EFI then I can always start again from scratch and change back to legacy methods! However it does look like with some work it should be possible to get the new boot system going. You quoted issues with breaking VTs on your system under EFI - I have had some systems do that a few years ago even with BIOS/MBR with Nvidia graphics too! Anyway it should be both fun and interesting getting my system working.... and once I have it working (with EFI) if I find anything which is different to the current wiki info I will add in any important details to the arch wiki so that others can benefit from my findings too - though it will be a couple of weeks before I have a working system I expect. However it is also relevant to the issue of secure boot at some point since this year there will be Windows 8 machines coming into the stores (on EFI hardware), and I expect that secure boot will become something that will need to be tackled by some people before too long (or switched off if that is possible where there are problems!) Either way I guess that since EFI is going to be the way of the future it is a useful learning curve getting the details understood - and now is about as good a time as any! -- mike c