Testing needed for GRUB EFI support

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

On 9 June 2010 00:01, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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.)
>

Hmmmm.... rEFIt is not picking this up will investigate further.

>> 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?
>

Yeap exactly that. The grub-efi just has a default menu entry to
chainload particular device, in my case i had it to chainload the
first harddrive and on another try I made grub-efi to chainload
grub-pc from the usb stick's mbr.


> 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.
>

I'm starting my personal battle to get macs boot with grub-efi ;-)

>> 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.
>

Yeap, but you can generate bios dump and make grub-efi load that. Of
course this cannot be done for livecd, it is machine specific.

See http://grub.enbug.org/TestingOnMacbook

> Thanks,
>
> --
> Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]
>
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