Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

New features which should be implemented in Porteus; suggestions are welcome. All questions or problems with testing releases (alpha, beta, or rc) should go in their relevant thread here, rather than the Bug Reports section.
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BlackRider
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Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#1 by BlackRider » 21 Oct 2011, 08:43

I am interested in knowing if Porteus developing team is planning to add the capability of booting Porteus in UEFI environments without BIOS emulation.

I think Ubuntu's Live CD can boot in such a mode but, according to what I have read, Syslinux does not support it yet. This feature could be interesting, as many UEFI guides I have found around the net require people to boot with a Live CD in UEFI mode.

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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#2 by fanthom » 21 Oct 2011, 11:09

hello BlackRider,

i personally does not posses UEFI mobo so must rely on information from other source.
if someone write a guide/Howto or point us to well documented one we can try to implement this feature in Porteus.
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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#3 by BlackRider » 21 Oct 2011, 12:29

I just asked because of curiosity.

You can use a virtual machine to emulate an EFI motherboard. VirtualBox OSE has an EFI mode, if you want to give it a try.

Don't take me wrong, I don't like UEFI very much. In fact, I think it is a mess. Damn it, even Linus says it is a mess! The problem is that UEFI will be soon the standard. I have been looking at some motherboard shops, and there is a lot of UEFI stuff already in the market. Given that some GNU/Linux distributions claim to have UEFI support without BIOS emulation, I just wondered how they did it and how was Porteus going to solve it.

Can anyone get an Ubuntu Cd and find out how the hell do they boot in UEFI mode? Las time I checked, syslinux didn't like UEFI at all. I would grab the CD myself, but my internet connection does not cut the mustard...

Here is an Ubuntu article about UEFI booting that you might find interesting: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#4 by fanthom » 22 Oct 2011, 16:53

Code: Select all

You can use a virtual machine to emulate an EFI motherboard. VirtualBox OSE has an EFI mode, if you want to give it a try.
nice - so we have a mobo :)

anyway - i have tried latest Ubuntu-11.10 in Vbox with EFI enabled and it didn't boot :o
i have stuck here:
http://oi52.tinypic.com/2zq6k95.jpg

any help?
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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#5 by BlackRider » 22 Oct 2011, 18:54

From Ubuntu docs:
From Ubuntu 11.04 onwards (x86_64 only), the ISO CD supports UEFI booting
Ensure you can virtualizate x86_64 environments, as only the x86_64 version will do the trick. You need to have a capable processor to use amd64 architectures under VirtualBox.

Is your iso the amd64? If so, what bootloader does it have?

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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#6 by brokenman » 23 Oct 2011, 23:57

I've read a bit about UEFI because like it or not ... we will end up with this as a standard in a few years. I think it is about time something replaced the BIOS which i feel is very dated ... but i think they should wait until they have perfected the UEFI before introducing tot he market. This could be a disaster. Some of the boot times look pretty nice from what i have seen though. I'll be researching this a little more i think.
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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#7 by fanthom » 27 Oct 2011, 17:08

@BlackRider
seems that Ubuntu has separate release for UEFI mobos:

Code: Select all

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-cdimage/releases/11.10/release/ubuntu-11.10-desktop-amd64+mac.iso
i guess that '+mac' version contains modified Grub 2 loader.
didn't try it yet but i think it must be not compatible with standard bioses - otherwise what would be the point for creating another ISO?

I think we can forget about this problem for now till someone post request for UEFI version of Porteus.
Thanks for pointing this out.
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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#8 by BlackRider » 27 Oct 2011, 21:29

i guess that '+mac' version contains modified Grub 2 loader.


Good to know. I wondered which bootloader they where using here.

I don't think we should start to worry, because motherboards are supposed to have compatibility modes, but we'd better keep an eye on this UEFI thing.

Who knows. Maybe it shows too be a disaster and the standard is changed again in three months...

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Re: Porteus pure UEFI booting (no BIOS emulation)

Post#9 by agreimann » 30 Dec 2011, 16:33

UEFI doesn't look fun or a great 'leap' forward--if anything, something like OpenFirmware is way more extensible and supports straight Forth commands... and why it's not replacing the ancient BIOS and the cheap UEFI will is beyond me... though I think it's part of M$'s evil plan to work with the OEMs. :evil:

EFI by itself... meh, isn't much of a problem--coupled with Secure Boot, it's dangerous. Anyway, I most certainly agree. We MUST keep watching this UEFI thing!

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