[arch-general] UEFI experience - recommendations needed.

[Mike Cloaked]

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Corrado Primier <ilbardo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2013/1/5 Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked at 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