[arch-dev-public] Syslinux 6.0 released with efi support

[Tom Gundersen]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> Am 21.06.2013 11:52, schrieb Tobias Powalowski:
>> 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).