Debian amd64 EFI test CD, build 2

Last updated: 24th November 2012

These images have been superseded - since the Wheezy d-i beta 3 release, amd64 CD images have all been made including EFI support. If you have any problems, please try official release / beta images instead - I'm now much more interested in finding and fixing bugs in those.

What's here?

This is a second 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 lilo/grub-pc

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 coming soon to debian-boot, full source and binary packages in the bits directory here.

Known issues and changes since test 1

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 better than it was in test1 (now that I've told it to display graphics!), but there's more work yet to be done, I want to integrate the boot options properly in the same way the isolinux ones are created, and I want to lay them out better. Currently the boot options are hard-coded and laid out using spaces in the text of each option. Ick! :-)
• For this second test build, I've got grub-efi to install and work reliably. I've borrowed some code from Ubuntu's version of debian-installer and tweaked some code myself. The code is significantly more involved than for elilo, but it seems to work OK. I've left elilo enabled as well in test2 to allow people to choose it instead, much the same way as d-i normally supports a choice between lilo and grub-pc. I'm probably going to drop the elilo option for the next build unless there is demand for it, though.
• UPDATE, 2012-08-24:Thie image will only boot in EFI mode, not in BIOS mode. I made a mistake in the ordering of the El Torito images on the CD and broke this. This bug is fixed in test build 3.

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