Re: EFI

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hello guys,

images for testing are from now on available here:

  https://nightly.ipfire.org/efi/

Best,
-Michael

On Mon, 2018-06-18 at 16:04 +0100, Michael Tremer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> it is finally time to think about EFI. That's the new kind of BIOS.
> 
> In the past we have been ignoring this since the community did not want to
> fund
> any work in this area and there was enough hardware out there that booted up
> fine without support for EFI.
> 
> Now this has changed, since Hannes told me that there is going to be more and
> more boards without a CSM and we are going to port IPFire to ARM64 soon which
> doesn't have a classic BIOS at all.
> 
> For ARM64, I might even want to push for EFI-only, but Arne disagrees :P
> 
> So what has happened so far?
> 
> I have created a new branch "efi":
> 
>   https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/efi
> 
> This branch collects all the changes to the bootloader, the scripts that
> author
> the images and the installer. Please review and send your comments.
> 
> The build creates two things in the end:
> 
> An ISO image that is bootable in EFI mode. It will install the system for EFI
> whether the system supports EFI or not. That will allow us to move a harddisk
> from one machine to another one. Opposed to the flash image, the installer
> will
> try to create a boot entry in the EFI BIOS.
> 
> The flash image will also boot in EFI mode or normal BIOS mode, depending on
> the
> system and leave the system configuration untouched.
> 
> Since EFI is a tricky standard and other distributions had loads of trouble
> with
> it in the past, we need loads of people to test these images on their
> hardware.
> I hope that we will be able to sort out any boot issues as soon as possible
> with
> this method.
> 
> Existing installations will not be migrated.
> 
> We will support EFI only for x86_64 and aarch64. There is only a few systems
> out
> there that are 32 bit and support EFI. Those are usually not a good choice for
> running IPFire.
> 
> Since I have no images ready right now, there is only code to review. I will
> upload images as soon as possible so that you guys can help testing without
> compiling them yourself.
> 
> Best,
> -Michael