EFI support

[Quinn Storm]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 16:58:42 -0500
Jerry Haltom <wasabi at larvalstage.net> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 


This is one of the reasons for grub2, though I don't know if its yet at
a usable state...I tried it on my legacy (BIOS) machine and couldn't
get it to present a menu no matter what I put in grub.cfg (tried their
wiki examples even), so maybe its not ready for prime-time yet, or
maybe I'm just an idiot.  Either way though, grub2 is the future and
will eventually be the answer for EFI machines.