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