Hi folks, So, I've spent a lot of time hacking on things to get i386 and mixed amd64/i386 systems working with EFI in d-i, debian-cd, grub etc. I've blogged about this a fair amount too, so hopefully this shouldn't be a major shock to people. There's a few more things that will need unblocking and migrating for this all to work with our standard builds and not just the dev CD builds I've been advertising for a while. That's easy, and the changes are safe and obvious (I hope!).
The remaining things that need doing are: * turning i386 EFI on in d-i builds (see trivial patch attached) * making (older) x86 Macs work after that As an explanation: turning on i386 EFI is an easy thing, but it will cause some older x86 Macs to stop being able to boot Debian installation media. They have broken firmware which breaks when more than one boot method is available on CD media (in this case, BIOS boot and EFI boot). So, if we want to continue supporting these users we'll need to provide a/some special Mac flavour(s) of i386 install disc. I'm proposing that we make *only* a special Mac flavour of the netinst, and I've already started working on that locally in debian-cd. So... How does that sound? We'll need to add more docs for this, of course, and it's likely to confuse *some* users which bothers me. But I don't really see many other options. Much as I'd personally like to see i386 start to die off and people move to better options like amd64 (or arm64! *grin*), there are still a lot of i386 machines coming out but they're not going to be supportable without EFI. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com < liw> everything I know about UK hotels I learned from "Fawlty Towers"
>From b87a9b27778bb40f1ea540db21b2a761ff6e2e3b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Steve McIntyre <st...@einval.com> Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 15:36:32 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Enable EFI image building for i386 --- build/config/i386.cfg | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/build/config/i386.cfg b/build/config/i386.cfg index 209af53..76782b3 100644 --- a/build/config/i386.cfg +++ b/build/config/i386.cfg @@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ SYSLINUX_CFG=standard VIDEO_MODE="vga=788" VIDEO_MODE_GTK="vga=788" -GRUB_EFI=n +GRUB_EFI=y GRUB_PLATFORM=i386-efi GRUB_EFI_NAME=ia32 -- 1.7.10.4
