Apart from a few select instances where quick linux-only, tftp-only support
was provided as 'one-off', xCAT doesn't support UEFI boot today. Here is
the plan for what it will look like:
-xnba will handle UEFI netboot to linux and esxi5
-esxi5 will chainload via a rebuild of VMWare bootloader provided in
xcat-dep
-linux will be handled by an enhanced elilo from xcat-dep
-Windows will be handled TFTP-only, without xnba at all (the only feature
it used in legacy world was iSCSI, which is in the next point...)
-iSCSI will be delegated to UEFI baked-in support instead of provided by
xNBA. This may require asu (or similar) to enable rfc4173 behavior if iqn
need not be dictated, and iqn control might be limited to IBM firmware only
for now. If this poses a problem, for now you'll have to 'legacy' boot.
-OS plugins will indicate which variants are known to be UEFI capable (e.g.
RedHat EL6/CentOS6/SLES11/Win2k8r2/Win7/ESXi5), users will not need to
indicate this
-UEFI style and 'legacy' style will both be set up to work, so that if UEFI
boot is attempted, it will be used, otherwise 'legacy' continues to work.
My expectation on user experience:
-More penguins (the vga console always enters framebuffer mode when UEFI
booting)
-No longer having to wait for the legacy environment to start up to boot.
-Lot's of fun stuff in /sys/firmware/efi (and associated tools like
efibootmgr working)
-You'll no longer have /sys/firmware/edd (and the resultant
useful /dev/disk/by/id/edd-int80* to tell which sd is the boot device).
-You'll end up having a small /boot/efi vfat partition
I'll make changes in 2.7 in the next few days to anaconda.pm, Schema.pm,
sles.pm, windows.pm, xnba.pm and xcatd (to enable proxydhcp for windows,
which is mandatory in uefi windows). I'll be adding 'xnba-snp' and
'elilo-xcat' packages to xcat-dep with the slick features like http
kernel/initrd download.
Let me know if anyone thinks there are problems with this.
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