Re: Simultaneous EFI and Legacy bootloader installation
On 03/30/2016 09:53 AM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 09:26:11AM -0500, Mario Limonciello wrote:
>> As Jared was mentioning to me the other day, there is unfortunately a
>> mentality in the server world of not installing the OS in UEFI yet and
>> leave the CSM enabled. The best way to allow for that mentality to
>> break is to allow an easy way for an admin to switch to UEFI mode
>> without re-installation.
> Or perhaps you could have a dialog box telling the user:
>
> You booted in legacy mode. It is recommended to boot in UEFI mode if
> posible to gain some benefits:
> - list of benefits
>
> That seems like a lot less trouble.
I think this is a great first step out of this thread. The challenge I
see with this is how you identify a machine that happens to be running a
BIOS that actually supports running in a UEFI mode.
If the system supports SMBIOS 2.3 or later, then the BIOS
characteristics extension byte 2 bit 3 should indicate that UEFI is
supported.
Where in the installer would this dialog land? Somewhere early on in
d-i I'd think after you picked your language but before you've gotten to
partitioning.
>
>> Yes, this will only help people wiling to reformat their disk. I think
>> if Debian can lead the way in switching to GPT by default it can be a
>> role model for other distributions to make this change as well.
> Again, if you want to lead that, then tell people to switch their system
> to UEFI before installing. Don't do it by making a hack job install
> that can cause lots of problems later.
>
>> To me this is an acceptable compromise.
>>
>> IIRC there is a debconf question about installing to the removable path
>> when you install EFI GRUB2. What are the defaults for this?
>> Would you consider making the default yes if you identify they are
>> running in legacy mode when you install the EFI GRUB2 (to do this
>> bootloader switch).
> That could be a useful feature.
>
> A simple tool to change a disk from MBR to GPT without changing the
> placement of partitions could also be handy. That could REALLY help
> people to move to GPT. You would have to find a way to make room for
> the ESP or BIOS Boot Partition though.
>
I'm assuming simple is a relative term. You would have to be able to
resize a filesystem in order to make another partition for the ESP.
Then you also could run into a situation of a system that wouldn't like
an ESP that it finds later in the disk. I don't know how common this
problem is.
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