[arch-releng] My archiso TODO/ideas (_draft_)

[KESHAV P.R.]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 04:54, Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi
<vmlinuz386 at yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
> On 08/10/2011 02:18 AM, Pierre Schmitz wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:43:09 -0300, Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi wrote:
>>>
>>> * UEFI boot support (FS#20419)
>>> At some time I want to support UEFI boot. But I do not have any real
>>> hardware to test it. Neither UEFI firmware for qemu (two versions
>>> tested) or virtualbox works fine, testing with some UEFI compatible
>>> mediums without happy results.
>>

What was the exact problem with QEMU and VBox UEFI firmware? Both use
Tianocore UDK/EDK2 OVMF firmware
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?title=OVMF_FAQ
.

>> No need to hurry here. Afaik UEFI and linux (or UEFI in general) has
>> quite some problems and regressions over the default BIOS boot. I have
>> such hardware, but what the bug report does not mention is that it works
>> pretty fine without any downsides without it.
>

Not with Linux 3.0 . Might want ot read http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ .

> I read some weeks ago that some UEFI implementations always/only read a
> "default" location in UEFI partitions, assuming that the only OS that will
> be used is Windows, breaking the "ecosystem" under /EFI directory.
>>>

The location you are btalking about is
<UEFI_SYSTEM_PARTITION>/efi/boot/bootx64.efi . Windows by default
copies <UEFI_SYSTEM_PARTITION>/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi to
bootx64.efi incase the UEFI NVRAM entry fails to boot . I currently
have grub2 as the bootx64.efi file and added a chainloading entry for
bootmgfw.efi ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting#Chainloading%20Windows%20x86_64%20UEFI-GPT
) .

You can have a look at Archboot iso for ideas on implementing UEFI
support. For generating iso, you need to use xorriso (from libisoburn)
(not cdrkit mkisofs). But implementing bootloader support in the aif
script is a much bigger task. I can help you with implementing UEFI
support in archiso but right now I am too busy to hack on aif .

For UEFI firmware chainloaded from BIOS (real hardware testing)
checkout www.rodsbooks.com/bios2uefi/index.html .

Regards.

Keshav