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Re: DebConf12 Debian derivatives BoF notes



Paul Wise left as an exercise for the reader:
> For the UEFI stuff, I would encourage you to join the Debian installer
> team to work on adding that to Debian, we had a session at DebConf12
> about this issue and I think the team wants to support UEFI for
> wheezy.

I will do so! I'd certainly hope UEFI support will be present by then :).

We ended up ditching partman and friends for our own system building tool
(growlight -- udebs, debs and dscs are in our APT source). I was originally
going to use rEFInd for the installer boot under UEFI, but ended up going
with GRUB2 for both roles. I'm building EFI stub support into our kernels
(shipping 3.4.4 currently) so that they can be run directly from UEFIspace
as well, but have not yet added support for preparing this (target system
only) boot mode. This latter was simple -- enable the EFISTUB kernel 
configuration option and kill the efi-modules udeb (as they now needed to be
built in) generation/use specs.

I don't see growlight going into d-i (although I'll ITP the regular deb
sometime soon), but it seems simple enough to add a "grub-efi-installer"
udeb that installs grub-efi rather than grub-pc, and checks for a valid ESP
in the postinst. it's a pretty clean analogue to the existing
infrastructure, from what i understand?

the unpleasant thing is that the Tlano UEFI firmware available for testing
with kvm etc doesn't seem representative of the existing physical
implementations. anyone who reads matt garrett's blog (and if you don't, you
have no business setting up uefi heh) is aware of the wide diversity of
braindamage in today's UEFIs. his work for RedHat 17's installer seems
pretty obviously the best possible solution to a messy problem.

-- 
nick black     http://www.sprezzatech.com -- unix and hpc consulting
to make an apple pie from scratch, you need first invent a universe.

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