Optical boot is also different on my UEFI 2.7 and 2.8 boxes, in that earlier firmware calls my optical drive a Pioneer, but now the boot option is listed as "UEFI Initio INIC-3609" and seems to net-boot from CDROM, if you have a bootloader under /boot on the .iso and don't have an /EFI in your filesystem. Except for SmartOS, illumos distros need to be separated from the overlapped partitions before burning to optical, at which point they will generally work unless OmniOS or XStreamOS.
If you burn my smartos-repack.iso to optical, new firmware will give you the choice of booting from its ESP or its .iso partition, and either way will work. Hipster and Tribblix, same thing but not with the distro.iso with Solaris Boot at the "edge" instead of a MBR. You do not need "Joliet" or anything else to identify your disk as bootable, if it's in the CDROM drive and has /boot/bootloader.efi, regardless of OS. All that sort of thing is deprecated, as is MBR partitioning. You may notice my iso9660 partitions are all of the "MBR" type. This is now a semaphore to indicate bootable, so you can ignore the pointer to the well-known location of a Windows bootloader, the pointer's deprecated. Booting a distro.iso from anything but an optical drive, won't work unless the partition type is MBR. Rufus and Ventoy don't work on the Dell, as they use MBR partitioning scheme, only GPT is allowed now (GPT defines PMBR). Walked down to my local small-town pharmacy yesterday and paid cash (POS down of course) for a stack of blank CD-R's and had a 90's flashback. -Eric ---- On Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:01:32 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote --- I thought I had things more-or-less figured out until I got my new Dell on July 3rd. GUI boot manager with file browser allows one to choose precisely which partition to boot, but you'll get lots of "vmlinuz | initrd | loader.lua | etc. is not a valid .efi file" which is annoyingly also the error message for "file not found". The even larger problem with my 27" touchscreen Inspiron, is I got the one with nvidia dgpu w/ 2GB GDDR6 and 16GB DDR4; whereas the AMD dgpu systems share 16GB DDR5 at the same price point. But, if I know Dell, even if you don't get an AIO you'll still have a default UEFI configuation with touchscreen enabled [1]. And the boot problems are well before the gfx driver anyway; there are only a handful of things on netboot.xyz which will boot on this firmware *and* get the gfx driver right. Zorin loads one called "NV177/Mesa Intel (RPL-U)" because both the built-in monitor and the HDMI-out are Intel chips displaying the Nvidia's output. But, unlike my AMD CPU box w/ AMI UEFI 2.8, which also lacks CSM, Dell has chosen not to include a single line of legacy support code. Wondering if anyone else has this new firmware. -Eric [1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec20-christensen.pdf https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest / illumos-discuss / see https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T31b1065c3e307d4f-Ma042dfbd3559765d7fca0fda ------------------------------------------ illumos: illumos-discuss Permalink: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T31b1065c3e307d4f-M2e9f4589b24ec43d8da9548a Delivery options: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
