[ Gah, missed this bit... ] On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 05:35:48PM +0100, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
... >Maybe Steve McIntyre can contribute an anecdote how he came to the >decision in debian-cd to use GRUB2 for EFI and thus to create the need >for two independent boot menu configurations. We already had working isohybrid media and I didn't want to drop that - in my opinion it's a very important feature. Plus, when I first started hacking on EFI things back in 2011 (or was it 2012? not sure) I genuinely could not get syslinux to do anything useful with EFI. As I already knew that people had EFI working with GRUB for booting off disk, I went that way and had a prototype running in a couple of days. Hacking on menus etc. was relatvely easy in comparison after that. Once we had that, it was an obvious step to use the same setup on live media as was already known to work on installation media. In fact, one of the projects I've been trying to get to for a couple of years now is simplifying things by going the other way: using GRUB for everything and dropping syslinux on Debian media. I guess I can see the attraction of syslinux, but I don't want to use it any more if I can avoid it. GRUB is massively more flexible and powerful. It's cross-platform (x86, arm32/arm64, sparc, powerpc, mips at least), actively maintained and reasonably well understood by quite a large group of people. It's far from perfect (as we all know!), but I think it's the best solution we have. That's my story for Debian EFI... -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "I can't ever sleep on planes ... call it irrational if you like, but I'm afraid I'll miss my stop" -- Vivek Das Mohapatra
