Testing needed for GRUB EFI support

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2010 at 11:43:21PM +0100, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> According to the UEFI spec removal media should have:
> 
> ----8<------
> If FilePathList[0] points to a device that supports the
> EFI_SIMPLE_FILE_SYSTEM_PROTOCOL, then the system firmware will attempt
> to boot from a
> removable media FilePathList[0] by adding a default file name in the form
> \EFI\BOOT\BOOT{machine type short-name}.EFI. Where machine type
> short-name defines a
> PE32+ image format architecture. Each file only contains one UEFI
> image type, and a system may
> support booting from one or more images types. Table 11 lists the UEFI
> image types.
> -----8<-------
> 
> x86      \EFI\BOOT\BOOTIA32.EFI
> x86_64 \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI
> Itanium \EFI\BOOT\BOOTIA64.EFI
> Arm      \EFI\BOOT\BOOTARM.EFI
> 
> Your image doesn't seem to comply with that.....

The image I created has a second El Torito catalog entry pointing to
/efi.img on the CD.  If you loop-mount that, you'll find:

  $ find /mnt/efi -type f
  /mnt/efi/boot/bootx64.efi
  /mnt/efi/boot/bootia32.efi

(El Torito is mentioned by reference in the EFI specification.)

> I have manage to make grub.efi to chainload grub-pc on intel mac which
> works wonderful ;-)

You mean have the EFI firmware load grub-efi, and then chainload grub-pc
dropping to legacy BIOS compatibility in the process?  Can you share a
little more about how that works?

Interestingly, one tester has already reported that a MacBook Pro picks
the i386-pc boot image when booting from my test CD.  If true, that's
ideal in some sense - we agreed at UDS that we wanted to keep Intel Macs
booting in BIOS mode, at least for the time being.

> and with recent posts on ubuntuforums it seems like only macs with
> nvidia have trouble with efi boot.

I thought I heard something else, but it was at second hand.  The
specific source of the problems I heard was that some drivers expect the
presence of a video BIOS.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]