[arch-general] UEFI experience - recommendations needed.

[archlinux at jelmail.com]

On 05/01/13 20:23, 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, I did some quick testing for a piece of work I recently completed.

I used VirtualBox because I don't have UEFI on the metal.

I tried a number of aparently UEFI distros like Fedora 18 and Ubuntu but 
could get none of them to work (they are supposed to  work out of the 
box). The only one I had success with was Arch.

I worked through using both GPT and MSDOS partitions and booting the 
same install via BIOS and UEFI and it all worked seamlessly.

For what it's worth, I just used the Arch install CD, the stock UEFI 
firmware on VirtualBox and Grub (2). I never found any reason to use 
rEFInd or anything else like that. You can, if you want to, do away with 
Grub as well as long as your kernel is an EFI application.

Best,
John