Hi On 2016-03-29, Mario Limonciello wrote: > On 03/29/2016 07:50 PM, Limonciello, Mario wrote: [...] > > I'd like to propose changing this and by default install both legacy > > and UEFI bootloaders on architectures that support both regardless of > > which mode the system is running in at installation. Making this > > change has a few obvious implications: > > * The installation disk would always be formatted GPT. > > * An ESP would always be created. > > * If the user is in legacy at installation time, it's not possible to > > create an EFI boot entry since EFI runtime services aren't present. > > The removable media fallback path (\efi\boot\boot$ARCH.efi) will need > > to be used to boot the system at this point and at some point create > > a "debian" NVRAM boot entry > > > > I'm not aware of any modern systems that are unable to boot a GPT > > partitioned disk. If there are systems like this in the wild, it > > would be worthwhile to leave support to install in MBR mode when > > doing an expert install so that people can still use them. [...] At least well into 2009/ 2010 era systems (most of those are early UEFI based underneath, but only expose a mandatory BIOS CSM to the user), you can sometimes find mainboards which refuse booting from a disk that doesn't have a MBR partition with the bootflag set. On these systems it is often possible to trick them into booting by setting the bootflag on the protective MBR around the GPT partitions, although this is a blatant violation of the UEFI specification (and might break more modern systems). Of course, most of the affected systems won't be detected as UEFI capable in the first place (because they will only allow booting via the BIOS CSM), but it's still something to be aware of. I'd very much appreciate BIOS and UEFI variants of grub to be co-installable (including their maintainer script orchestration), also to make moving installed systems between different mainboards easier (I am using a custom /etc/grub.d/ hook using grub-pc and grub-efi-amd64-bin for semi-portable installations on USB sticks myself, usually without any particular problems besides the one mentioned above). Regards Stefan Lippers-Hollmann
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