- Uefitool add uefi shell to bios install#
- Uefitool add uefi shell to bios update#
- Uefitool add uefi shell to bios code#
Install your Arch Linux “as usual” (following the official install guide for instance) When “partitionning”, create a boot partition (mine was a GPT - FAT32 is compulsory for UEFI) and mount it as /mnt/boot. Installing Arch Linux with direct UEFI boot Steps are actually simplier than it looks and they can easily be done on an already installed Arch Linux or maybe even on an other distribution if you know your way. In this article, I explain how I made what is previously explained while installing a brand new Arch Linux. But this is a very minor drawback especially if you do not plan to install another OS on that computer. So if you install another OS, you will get booting files for all OSes in \ or some in \ and some in \EFI\other_os. Cons are you are not cleanly separating each OS boot files in their own subdirectory. The last step is to create an entry on the EFI table that loads \vmlinuz-linux (instead of \EFI\my_os\vmlinuz-linux).
Uefitool add uefi shell to bios update#
The main benefit beeing that next time you update the kernel ( pacman -S linux), the kernel ( vmlinuz-linux) and the newly generated initramfs image are installed by pacman in /boot, which is the root of the boot partition (as the boot partition is mounted in /boot). Instead, mount the boot partition in /boot. So here is what I propose: do not mount the boot partition in /boot/efi and do not use the standard EFI folder hierarchy in the boot partition. But this does not look really clean to me and I would have liked something more KISS.
The idea is to create a HOOK with a loop to wait for the initramfs generation to complete and then copies the files on the boot partition. There is a solution explained in the Arch Linux wiki involving a mkinitcpio HOOK trick (thus only usable with Arch Linux). So you will need to make sure the newly installed kernel and the generated initramfs are copied inside the \EFI\my_os folder. But the UEFI is instructed to load the one located in \EFI\my_os\. So next time you will update the kernel, the packet manager will install the kernel ( vmlinuz-linux) in /boot. The reason is because EFI uses a standard folder hierarchy on the boot partition like such: The only issue you are left with is “maintenance”. So let us explain it here so that you will not get shocked after I made you format your partitions :).īasically the technique explained in Rod Smith’s post lets you create a boot entry that instructs the UEFI to load a kernel located (inside the boot partition) at \EFI\my_os\vmlinuz-linux (I use backslash as a UEFI boot partition must be FAT formatted and backslash must be used when handling UEFI boot entries with efibootmgr). This article repeats what has already been explained in this post by Rod Smith (thank you very much for the great article) and adds a trick that some might not like. UEFI can directly hand over control to your distribution’s kernel which acts as its own boot loader. I guess you see where I’m going: booting is then possible without any third party boot loader such as GRUB, Lilo etc.
Uefitool add uefi shell to bios code#
And this is where the fun enters the party : the Linux kernel, in its infinite wisdom, has the necessary code to act as a boot loader since version 3.3.0.
So GRUB is only left with the boot loading part. And this really matters because new UEFI are capable of handling boot management (the part where you choose the OS you want to boot). It first manages which kernel you want to boot (it is thus a “boot manager”) and after you selected one, it actually loads it (also making it a “boot loader”). The most interesting one is the fact that it actually performs two differents things. So while reading wiki articles and blog posts in order to figure out what I should do to install and boot a brand new Arch Linux, I learnt a lot about GRUB. Bye bye old Bios and MBR welcome UEFI and GPT.
This gave me the opportunity to dive back into the Linux boot stuff and I actually figured a lot had changed. I bought myself a new laptop the other day: an Asus N56VZ.
0 kommentar(er)
