EFI

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

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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