Re: Can/should we have an efi/efi-any platform architecture?
On 11 December 2014 at 20:07, Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2014 19:36:19 +0100
> Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Leif,
>>
>> On 11.12.2014 19:08, Leif Lindholm wrote:
>>
>> > If we could transition this to be able to specify efi-all (or
>> > whatever) instead of an explicit list of certain architectures, this
>> > would be a lot more straightforward operation.
>>
>> > Would this be useful, desirable, an accident waiting to happen?
>>
>> Useful, possibly, but there is no mechanism that could be used or
>> recycled for that, so it would be an entirely new mechanism in the
>> package management framework, with a fairly limited use case.
>
> There is an accepted mechanism: linux-any is a group of architectures
> which have one set of packages in common and we have had others.
> efi-any would seem to be entirely possible without implementing
> something completely new. It would need dpkg and buildd support. With
> linux-any it relies on a list of architectures in a table in dpkg - the
> same could be done for other groups.
>
> The mechanisms exist, the question is how many other variants would be
> created by adopting this?
>
And it will require a long time to be used. Imho this smells more like
a build profile e.g.
BuildDepends: does-not-implement-efi <!efi>
That way on non-efi implementing architectures the package will get
stuck in a dep-wait state.
However, EFI is not that simple as it has it's own architecture
mapping, it's own binary format and execution environment, but it is
unlikely that we will see debian ported to be run in pure EFI
environment. EFI is currently defined for IA32, X64, IA64, ARM, and
AA64. However in practice the support implementing it is ahead on X64
(despite IA64 being the first one). E.g. even things like edk2 - i've
tried to compile it for IA32 but appears to be only partially
implemented for gcc toolchain. Thus even if something is "efi-ish" and
should build for all "efi-like-arches" it doesn't mean that it was
ported or builds with efi toolchain.
For some of these things we are stepping into crazy land of ia32-libs
territory where we are considering to introduce and install grub-ia32
& grub-x64 on amd64 systems.
IMHO it would be cool to compile gnu-efi, grub, etc as
gnu-efi:efi-ia32, gnu-efi:efi-x64 etc. packages and have generic
mapping somewhere between debian architectures & efi architectures and
install those things as appropriate. That would be a partial arch.
--
Regards,
Dimitri.
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