Debian amd64 EFI test CD, build 1

Last updated: 13th August 2012

What's here?

This is a first build of a netinst CD with experimental EFI support included. This image should boot and work in EFI mode on a recent amd64 (x86_64) machine, doing the following steps differently:

• boot via UEFI rather than BIOS mode
• use GPT partitioning on hard disks rather than MSDOS
• add a FAT-formatted EFI partition for booting
• install an EFI bootloader rather than grub/lilo

This CD image is a test build, made using some experimental test code in debian-cd (SVN branch here) and some tweaked packages in debian-installer. Diffs in the mail I sent to debian-boot, full source and binary packages in the bits directory here.

Known issues

This is an experimental build, so bugs and mistakes are quite likely! Nonetheless, in my own testing (in a VM using OVMF, and on a recent desktop machine) it seems to work ok. Here's a list of the known issues and limitations that have been found:

• The image does not work on a USB key, only when written to a CD or used as a CD image in a VM. This is due to the different way that UEFI booting works - the existing debian-cd isohybrid setup only works using a BIOS-compatible boot mechanism. I'm hoping to fix this for the next build.
• The initial grub menu is not pretty, but this will be fixed to get a splash screen similar to the BIOS boot screen.
• For this first test build, I couldn't get grub-efi to install and work reliably. I opted to use elilo instead, as used for a long time to boot ia64 systems. I'm hoping to get grub to work for the next build.

If you have EFI hardware, please try this image and let me know how you get on, via the debian-cd and debian-boot mailing lists.

Steve McIntyre