UEFI support in boot image

[Marius Bakke]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> Marius Bakke <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>>    3. UEFI support documented and possibly improved.
>>>
>>>       We can certainly document the UEFI setup and add the /boot/efi
>>>       partition in some of the ‘operating-system’ examples.
>>>
>>>       The more difficult part is the installation: do we need to make a
>>>       second, UEFI-specific, installation image?  When I installed
>>>       GuixSD on UEFI, I booted our installation image as “legacy”, but
>>>       then GRUB would default to a legacy install, not a UEFI install:
>>>
>>>         https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-12/msg00799.html
>>>
>>>       I’m not sure exactly what needs to be done.  Thoughts?
>>
>> I plan to work on this over the next few days. The most common way is to
>> create a "hybrid" disk image that supports both UEFI and BIOS boot. IIRC
>> Debian achieves this by using Isolinux to create the EFI payload and
>> chainload to Grub. More information next week :-)
>
> Awesome, thanks for volunteering!

Apologies for the late follow-up, but I finally found some time to work
on this.

I've attached a few patches as a humble beginning, but currently the
"format-partition" code in (gnu build vm) needs to learn some
filesystem-specific parameters. So, I don't think it will be ready for
the upcoming release.

I have also done some reading and don't think we can use isolinux as it
requires an image in ISO 9660 format. Nor does the syslinux utilities
actually support chainloading grub from UEFI as I had hoped.

So I think we'll have to offer UEFI as a standalone image, at least to
begin with. Unfortunately I also believe it needs to be generated from a
UEFI system, but this grub limitation can hopefully be lifted.

Anyway, here is the current status (advice on the FIXME appreciated):

uefi-boot.patch
Description: Text Data

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature