Steve's blog

My second alpha release of a Wheezy netinst CD for amd64 EFI seemed to work OK for me and a few others, but it wasn't 100% good, with (at least) two issues:

It didn't work as a hybrid (CD or USB) image, just working from CD for EFI
It didn't work for BIOS booting due to a silly bug

In the couple of days since then, I've fixed both of these issues. Yay! Hybrid boot was easier than I expected - I've just added a tiny FAT partition to the image containing the grub EFI bootloader and that seems to work fine. I also found that I made a mistake in the ordering of the El Torito boot records in the last image. BIOS boot seems to be limited to just the first image available on the machines I've tested with, wherease EFI will happily work as a secondary image. I've swapped them around in my code, and things look much better now. So, time for another CD alpha release for testing.

Grab the image from http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/efi-development/upload3/ if you'd like to help test it. Please do, and let me know via debian-boot/debian-cd how you get on.

As previously, the "bits" subdirectory contains all the tweaked d-i packages I've played with, in both source and binary form. My debian-cd changes are still in my branch but are just about ready for merging I think. I've posted my full set of d-i patches to the debian-boot list for review now, and hopefully we'll be able to get those changes merged in after the Wheezy d-i beta 2 build is done. Full speed ahead for EFI in beta 3!

03:16 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 16 comments

Comments

Re: Possibility of grub-less EFI stub booting?
Steve wrote on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:43

It could be a nice move to simplify the boot-stack to not need grub, but as a general-purpose option for now I think EFI->grub->kernel is a better choice for most people, and definitely as a default for an installer. Ditto GPT: while many people may not *need* it, frankly I think it's a better option than DOS-style partitioning anyway, with fewer limitations. It doesn't hurt to use it by default for EFI systems.

I'd be happy to help review patches for going the grub-less route if you're interested in working on that.

Thanks for confirming the test CD works for you, as well! :-)

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