Bug#771465: Please add UEFI boot files to i386 and amd64 netboot images

[Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Ian Campbell <ijc@debian.org> wrote:
> Do you mean mini.iso as in:
> http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/dists/jessie/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso
> or something else?

Hi Ian,

Yes, that's the one, although I've tested with the i386 image.

> I'm not actually 100% clear what you are asking for. Given the above
> mini.iso I have in the ESP:
>
> $ isoinfo -x /boot/grub/efi.img -RJ -i mini.iso-sid > efi.img
> $ mdir -i efi.img -/ -b
> ::/efi/
> ::/efi/boot/
> ::/efi/boot/bootx64.efi
>
> and
>
> $ isoinfo -f -RJ -i mini.iso-sid
>
> shows lots of stuff in /boot/grub/x86_64-efi of the main image, all of
> which I believe is sufficient to boot on a 64-bit EFI system.
>
> The i386 version of mini.iso instead has bootia32.efi in the ESP and
> /boot/grub/i386-efi on the main ISO.
>
> So either this isn't working for you or the request you are making is
> for something else in addition.

The latest mini.iso netboot image is not booting on my Macbook2,1 but
the official Debian 8.2 netinst image (315 MB) does.

The USB-sticks I've managed to boot in this machine all have had the
file efi/boot/bootia32.efi on the single partition they've had, either
a vfat partition prepared by grub-install or a is9660 filesystem
copied from the installer image. That's also the case with the 8.2
netinst image:

$ 7z l debian-8.2.0-i386-netinst.iso | grep bootia
2015-09-06 12:00:44 .....       272384       272384  efi/boot/bootia32.efi

This file is not present in the netboot mini.iso.

The EFI implementation on old intel Macbooks is probably broken in
several ways, but to me it looks like the fix is easy, known, and
takes all of 272384 bytes in the installation image. But you are
right, the patch is not there yet.

Best,
Teemu