Bug#669033: linux-2.6: Enable EFI boot stub for x86 and x86-64
Source: linux-2.6
Severity: wishlist
It would be really useful for certain EFI machines if the Debian kernel
on x86 and x86-64 was built with CONFIG_EFI_STUB enabled. This option
makes the produced bzImage into a binary that can be directly started
from EFI firmware without needing a Linux bootloader. It does not affect
"normal" bzImage booting, so it should be okay for it to be enabled (it
just costs a few kilobytes for the code).
This would make it much easier to boot Debian on EFI-only machines in
certain cases, especially the installer, which currently requires me to
compile my own EFI GRUB2 from source to get one that actually works
correctly, as elilo doesn't work on the machine I have and only the HEAD
of GRUB2 works. Booting the kernel directly from the firmware works with
much less effort and makes it possible to load a d-i netboot image with
just vmlinux and initrd.gz on a USB stick.
Yes, I would specifically like this on both 32 and 64 bit x86, because
one of the EFI machines I have is a rare non-Mac 32-bit EFI system :)
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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