Hi everyone,
I am currently missing two things:
* There is no description how to boot LFS from a GPT partitioned disk
on UEFI firmware - the background of this proposal is that many new
UEFI setups hide legacy support in a relly terrible way. Some setups
use labels like "Operating system support: Windows 7" to enable the
CSM. The current situation is that every UEFI includes an CSM, but
Microsofts requirements to OEMs only say that there must be a
possibility to disable secure boot. So in the short term PCs without
CSM will appear. I would take the task of adding gnu-uefi and
gummiboot to chapter 6 and write chapter 8.5 "Using gummiboot to
setup the boot process (UEFI)". I would keep 8.5 as simple as
possible - no cascade of bootloaders with preloader.efi. So the
users have to disable secure boot.
* I successfully built most of chapter 5 on Raspberry Pi (running
Raspbian). This takes lots of patience, but the differences in
configuration and the patches required are surprisingly small. So if
you want me to, I would provide you with a hand full of changes to
the book, of course this would finally culminate in adding chapter
8.6 "Raspberry Pi: Setting up the boot process" - are you
interested? I think the additional complexity introduced is quite
small and since the Raspberry Pi nowadays is many people's entry to
linux, why not make it their starting point for LFS?
Regarding booting there is also one aspect where I wonder how to provide
a clean and simple solution: Booting large hard disks (512B sectors and
larger than 2TB) on ordinary BIOS systems. This works with a GPT (I will
not cover an overly complex compat MBR partition table). As bootloader I
usually use extlinux in combination with syslinux' compatibility MBR.
This just requires a partition marked "legacy_boot" that fits within the
fist 2TB of the hard disk. It is also possible using GRUB, in this case
GRUB requires a small partition (without FS, just for GRUBs binary
data). The extlinux solution is more simple, thus I prefer this one. If
the decision which bootloader to cover was up to me, I would go with the
syslinux family - but since GRUB is used as default on nearly every
"normal" distro out there I fully understand that GRUB was chosen as
default.
Regarding my first point we could also go with GRUB. But this would
require building a separate GRUB installation for a different target
architechture (in this case x86_64 UEFI) and a quite different approac
to build an GRUB image that is a valid EFI binary. It would also require
to move to GRUB 2.02 Beta (at least for UEFI), since GRUB 2.00 has lots
of bugs regarding UEFI boot. You also have to fiddle around with
graphics mode with GRUB due to the reason that GRUB really acts as a
bootloader whereas gummiboot just chainloads EFI binaries. GRUB acting
as a bootloader also means that a 32 bit kernel can be started on 64 bit
machines - this is not possible with gummiboot. But in my opinion the
simplicity speaks in favor of gummiboot.
Yours,
Mattias
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