EFI support

[Jerry Haltom]

Howdy.

I just purchased a new system. It is a Xeon Woodcrest dual-core, Intel
brand motherboard. EM64T.

Installing Ubuntu on it has proved to be a huge lesson! You see, this
system, is the first EFI system I've ever dealt with.

EFI, that new replacement to BIOS.

The disks are not MBR partitions, they are GPT. The firmware has a
*SHELL. LILO and Grub do work, but only in a legacy mode.


Here's where it seems to stand:

a) Partman cannot format disks to GPT. It can view/edit existing GPT
partitions though.
b) There's no good way to boot. Grub can't read from GPT partitions.
LILO works, but requires quite a bit of hackery to get it right. Since
it can't find a MBR... and has no real MBR partitions. You can get it
working by manually specifying sector offsets. That sucks.

elilo exists, but has no version in the archive for amd64. Doesn't seem
to compile for amd64. Somebody needs to fix that.

Do we have plans to start dealing with EFI? If Intel's server boards are
coming this way now, it's going to hit pretty soon.