[arch-general] UEFI experience - recommendations needed.

[Curtis Shimamoto]

On 01/05/13 at 08:23pm, Mike Cloaked wrote:
> I am building a machine which has an EFI capable boot on the motherboard
> together with an mSATA drive for the root and boot partitions and an SSD
> for the /opt and swap partitions, and just a single arch x86_64 install
> when it is built - no dual booting to other OSes.  I have been looking up
> information about UEFI with GPT partitioning and have read about various
> problems that people have had with such systems.
> 
> So at this stage I am unsure whether to stick with what I know (BIOS/MBR
> and GRUB2 with full systemd) or whether to plunge into the unknown (for
> me!) and try EFI/GPT! (with rEFInd)
> 
> Does anyone have experience with such a UEFI system on this list? Apart
> from the info on the arch wiki and the install wiki info (which I have been
> reading), are systems like this reliable once installed? Does the routine
> pacman update process for kernels lead to issues requiring manual
> intervention with EFI/GPT or it is as generally reliable as BIOS/MBR?
> 
> I would be interested to hear from anyone with this kind of experience
> running arch - if it is useful the motherboard I am using is an Intel
> DQ77KB (which I intend to update with the latest BIOS firmware) and with
> the Intel i3-3220T CPU.
> 
> Thanks for any replies (and useful links)
> 
> -- 
> mike c

Mike,

I use UEFI, and find it as reliable as bios booting ever was.  At the
moment I was only a single Arch Linux installation on my system.  I have
a Thinkpad with a 250GB Samsung 840, a 128GB Samsung 830, and a Mushkin
Atlas 128GB mSATA. 

You should know that it is no problem to set things up with legacy bios
bootability, and then get your setup booting with UEFI at a later time.
The two standards actually don't even conflict with each other and can
peacefully coexist. I actually have my system's bios set to UEFI only,
but I also have syslinux installed as a just in case kind of thing. 

I would recommend using GPT no matter which method you choose (or if you
choose both).  I think MBR partitioning is getting a bit outdated, and
extended partitions are to be avoided whenver possible.  But from the
sound of it, you won't have the need to use extended partitions anyway.
Still the flexability of GPT is much greater, and I really like the fact
that it puts the partition table in the beginning of the disk like
normal, but also ar the end for a backup.  I have actually had to restore
my partition table from the backup once (while messing around with
windows to do a firmware update, windows does some funky things).

The only thing I have done that differs from the recommendations of the
wiki is that I actually use my EFI system partition as /boot.  This is
partially because my system does not seem to like the initramfs anywhere
but the root of the ESP (when I use an efibootmgr entry to directly boot
the kernel stubloader).

During updates, it is nice to have the kernel be installed to the correct
place.  But I still require a systemd.path/systemd.service to append
'.efi' to the kernel (which designates it as a UEFI application to my
firmware).

So I guess just get things set up with the familiar legacy bios, but use
GPT for sure.  If you want to use the ESP as /boot, I know that syslinux
will boot from vfat, but I am not sure about grub as I have not tried it.

I hope this information helps.

Regards,
-- 
Curtis Shimamoto
sugar.and.scruffy at gmail.com