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Re: EFI and binary distributors
From: |
Yoshinori K. Okuji |
Subject: |
Re: EFI and binary distributors |
Date: |
Tue, 1 May 2007 23:01:26 +0200 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.8.2 |
On Tuesday 01 May 2007 22:10, Robert Millan wrote:
> What is the recommended way for binary distributors of GRUB to support
> PC/BIOS and EFI at the same time? Is it possible to build a mixed binary
> that supports both systems somehow? (and if it isn't, are there plans or
> ongoing work for that?)
I don't think so. The size restriction is too severe for PC BIOS.
One possibility is to bundle binary images both for PC BIOS and EFI in a
package, and selectively use one of them by grub-install. But this has a
serious issue, on a EFI platform which supports Legacy Boot, because the user
can use both.
Personally, I think it is much cleaner to use just EFI on EFI platforms
instead of Legacy Boot. But this depends on a preference... For now, I have
no good idea.
> Also, which are the cpu platforms that may use EFI? From what I could
> find, it seems that:
>
> - ia32 doesn't have it
You forgot about Intel Mac. :)
In fact, my Mac Mini is with Intel Core Solo, which definitely does not
support 64-bit.
> - ia64 always has it
> - amd64 only has it on Intel-Macs, and will have it on more devices in
> the future
Do Intel Mac have AMD processors, or do you mean EM64T? If you just mean IA-32
architecture with 64-bit extensions (both Intel's and AMD's), the canonical
name in GNU is "x86_64".
> Am I missing something?
No idea. In theory, nothing prevents porting EFI to other architectures.
Wikipedia mentions XScale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
Okuji