On 11/16/2013 05:44 PM, Geoff Swan wrote:
On 17/11/2013 10:10 AM, Dan McGhee wrote:
On 11/16/2013 03:40 PM, Ken Moffat wrote:
On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 02:04:31PM -0500, Alan Feuerbacher wrote:
Hi,
After getting the stock LFS system installed, with an MBR type boot
installation, I'm experimenting with installing to a UEFI type boot
location on a brand new hard drive. I've been reading a lot of online
documentation, and have tried a first-cut installation, but am not
having success in installing. While I can install the entire set of LFS
programs, and a lot of BLFS programs, when I try to boot up, Linux fires
up but quickly generates a fatal error.
Is there any possibility of advice from the LFS staff?
http://www.mail-archive.com/lfs-support@linuxfromscratch.org/
See the posts from Dan McGhee - most recently on 13th November, but
starting on 28th October. Four threads, titles mentioning GRUB
or EFI. At the moment they are all on the first page at that link,
at least in firefox.
Our best advice / guesses is in those threads. Dan hasn't cracked
it yet, but your hardware might be different.
?en
I thought I was going to be able to report success this afternoon, but
as yet "no joy." My efforts so far have resulted in the following
conclusions:
1. There is something wrong in my grub set-up.
2. My kernel is not bootable.
3. I have missed something in the EFI info.
At this point, all I want is some indication that my kernel is booting.
As long as I get only one message from the kernel and the system freezes
I can conclude that all else is fine except my kernel.
I'm writing this e-mail "on the fly" and don't have my EFI sources at
hand. I read last night that from the EFI partition the bootloader--in
this case GRUB--doesn't know where the file system is even though it can
read the partition table. Therefore, and initramfs is called for. I
know nothing about these. I've read what the BLFS book has and have
tried it with no success. At this point, I don't know enough to solve
any "gotcha's" that the initramfs hint gives. Gonna try dracut.
If I can't make any head-way in the next few days, I'm going to install
a minimal ArchLinux system and try the various GRUB options. I don't
think they sign their kernels--see last paragraph--and that will test
the GRUB stuff.
I cannot verify this in any documentation. It's just a hunch I have.
When it comes to booting using an EFI partition, we must ignore
everything we've learned about booting and using GRUB. It may be that
using GRUB in a multiboot environment we cannot use the "linux
/boot/vmliz* root=/dev/xxx ro" to get to another distro. We may have to
use grub's chainloader to do that. I say this because, I have not been
able to get Ubuntu to boot from my LFS-7.4 system in the "old" way. I
was successful using the chainloader. If all this is true, then the
"easiest" way to accomplish this is to use 'efibootmgr' or 'gummiboot'
and boot everything thing we have from the EFI partition.
My goal is to be able to be able to answer these questions when my
testing is over.
@Alan
Did you remove GRUB from your MBR Protected Layer or are you still using
it? Do you use an initrd or initramfs? Did you boot your kernel
successfully before you started these EFI experiments? Does your
failure message come from the kernel or from the LFS bootscripts? What
does it say? Must you do a "hard" reset to start over or can you use
ALT-CTRL-DEL?
There is only one other option that's keeping me from booting in this
environment. It's so distasteful that I don't even want to write it.
But, at least in my firmware, it may be necessary for me to "sign" my
kernel. That's not even for "secure" boot. I hope that's not true.
Dan
Dan,
I could not get EFI and Grub2 to co-operate so I went for the Linux
EFI image route instead and eliminated the boot manager. It is not
really necessary unless you want to select from different kernels on
the system.
The kernel must be compiled with the EFI settings:
CONFIG_EFI=y
CONFIG_RELOCATABLE=y
CONFIG_FB_EFI=y
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y
CONFIG_EFI_VARS=y
CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y
and also the kernel parameters built-in:
CONFIG_CMDLINE="root=/dev/sda3 ro --verbose"
then use efibootmgr to register the new kernel image with the BIOS, so
it can be selected at boot time.
Geoff
Geoff, your comments are giving me a break from answering questions in
"make oldconfig" :)
Just so I understand. You got your kernel--3.10.10 (?)--to boot from
the EFI partition? And without initrd or initramfs? The answer to this
question is important to me.
As I said before, I don't have my references close right now, but you
may want to consider reconfiguring your kernel with "CONFIG_EFI_VARS=n"
and enabling evifarfs. efivars is going away. I'll check my references
and post later with the appropriate one. I have been using efivarfs
mounted at /sys/firmware/efi/efivars with great success. Otherwise, I
have been configuring my kernels the same with the exception that I have
been trying to pass the kernel parameters with GRUB2.
I have gotten GRUB2 to cooperate in a minimal way so far. Ultimately,
I'm going to go to the situation you have with all the stuff, in the
form of their individual bootloaders, on the EFI partition and use
efibootmgr to have the system Boot Manager present me my options.
I'm doing all this testing so that I can write everything up and present
it to LFS so that individuals can choose whether they will use grub or
not and where to put it. Of course, if someone wants to boot with grub
in the BIOS mode that is already well documented in LFS.
Thanks for your post.
Dan
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