EFI support

[Jerry Haltom]

> Once installed directly onto a Mactel, 'elilo' is used to boot the Ubuntu
> system; a variety of issues to do with GPT partitioning and HFS+ filesystem
> creation currently mean that the Mactel doesn't /install/ from the normal
> i386 CD---even though the standard Ubuntu kernel supports Mactel hardware.

> 'elilo' is probably the way to go for getting Ubuntu onto your new EFI
> powered box.  Rest assured that you *will* get Ubuntu to work, it just might
> take a bit of investigation!...
> 
> The most important thing for you to do is to *keep track* of what changes
> you've done, so that once finished, the solution can be documented.  Clear
> instructions can then be made available to other Ubuntu admins in the same
> situation and---ultimately---fixed in the main Ubuntu distribution to work
> out of the box.

I've been working with elilo for a day now, and am just about to hit a
breakthrough.

For one, this is a 64 bit server system, and is going to require a 64
bit kernel. So, I'm setting it up as thus (I have mucho ram.) elilo is
currently not built in the amd64 archive, only the i386 archive. This is
most likely a bug against the elilo package. I don't have the expertise
to fix this.

elilo for ia32 seems to be able to boot a 64 bit kernel, since it's
mostly just loading it at an address and jumping to it. The kernel can
start. It cannot however deal with an initramfs. I am guessing this
problem is because it cannot pass a meaningful start address of the
initramfs to the kernel.

I will not be able to fix this on my own, so I'm searching for
workarounds. Right now I am recompiling the Ubuntu kernel with a build
in initramfs cpio.gz image using the CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE option. In
fact, the build just failed:

System size too big: use modules instead!

This seems to be a hard coded limit. I'm just commenting out the check!
I suspect it will work because I am not constrained by IBM BIOS calls.
We shall see shortly!