[arch-general] UEFI experience - recommendations needed.

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Saturday 05 Jan 2013 20:23:39 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)

I have a Dell Latitude E5520 in EFI-only mode.  I set it up over a year ago 
now by simply following the wiki to set up GPT partitioning and Grub 2 for 
bootloading.  I have three partitions: /boot, /boot/efi, and an LVM PV for the 
rest.  I found it relatively straight-forward; I was actually a little 
surprised.

Paul