Re: Boot Order
On Wed, 2018-02-28 at 02:16 +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 09:01:18PM -0500, Dan Norton wrote:
> > On Mon, 26 Feb 2018 10:40:20 -0500
> > lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen) wrote:
> > >
> > > With UEFI, adding an entry to the boot meny is what you do when
> > > you
> > > install an OS you want to be able to boot. UEFI does not rely on
> > > the
> > > boot sector anymore the way legacy BIOS did.
> > >
> > > Adding it first makes sense since why install it if you don't
> > > want to
> > > use it? Advanced users can always rearrange the order if they
> > > want
> > > something else. No way an installer could guess where in an
> > > existing
> > > list to insert itself. First is the only sane default option.
> > >
> >
> > Why insert itself anywhere in the first place? The machine booted
> > before the installation. To start installing, the installation
> > medium
> > is placed in a CD drive or USB port and the machine is rebooted.
> > During
> > installation, other OSs are detected by the installer. The
> > installer
> > forms the grub menu with the latest install first and the other OSs
> > following. Installer finishes by reminding the admin to remove the
> > installation medium and it reboots the machine. The latest install
> > boots unless the admin intervenes. Where in this process is a
> > requirement to tinker with the UEFI menu?
>
> As Lennart said: "adding an entry to the boot meny is what you do when
> you install an OS you want to be able to boot". Adding an entry in the
> UEFI boot variables *is how UEFI is meant to work*. If you don't add
> an entry there, a correctly-working UEFI won't know how to find the OS
> you just installed.
The entry which Debian is adding to the UEFI boot menu is really a
pointer to the Grub (so a more technically correct title for the entry
would be "Debian's Grub bootloader"[0], but that would be terrible from
a UI perspective).
If Debian didn't install Grub into the UEFI boot menu then nothing else
in the system would know how to read and interpret the Grub menu. So
installing Grub is needed for:
> > The installer forms the grub menu
to have any meaning/use.
The system probably has a Windows bootloader preinstalled (probably
labelled "Hard Drive" in the UEFI menu) but that is not as flexible as
Grub and Debian does/will not mess around with its configuration files.
Ian.
[0] In the same way I suggested earlier that "Hard Drive" was just what
MS (or the system builder or whoever) has decided to call the entry
which points to the Windows bootloader. That's a reasonable choice for
an ecosystem where some large majority of users do not install an
alternative (either replacement or dual boot) OS. In Debian's case a
more specificly named entry makes sense.
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