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Bug#812236: CD-Image does not boot with Libreboot/GRUB



On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 11:48:27PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> 
> See
> 
>   http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc/menu
> 
> for docs on isolinux menus. Grub's support for isolinux menus is
> clearly not complete/correct here, and that's your problem I'm
> afraid. Isolinux parses these menus just fine.

I digged deeper, and I guess this is correct. There are three problems
around here AFAICS:

1) Grub's implementation of invoking isolinux doesn't work correctly.

2) Grub's chainloading depends on BIOS/UEFI:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html
| Chain-loading is only supported on PC BIOS and EFI platforms.

> It looks like a (design?) bug that Libreboot won't do normal boot
> sector booting like a conventional BIOS.

3) Libreboot doesn't provide the information for chainloading the same
way as BIOS/UEFI.

Most likely those issues have to be fixed in Grub.  Maybe there is a
workaround to mitigate the problem with an intermediate USB-stick by
invoking SmartBootManager as payload (kernel), which doesn't depend
on chainloading at all. There are hints that this was done a couple
of years ago, but it looks difficult to reproduce this solution.

Some tests indicate that there might be
more issues with 16bit vs. 32bit mode.
-- 
regards
Frank


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