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Hi,
I know that most people don't care about EFI-based booting (i.e.
elilo), but just in case there is anyone lingering on this list that
does, here's something for you to play with.
Under the umbrella of the rEFIt project, I have developed additional
file system drivers for the EFI environment. ext2/ext3 and ReiserFS
are usable, and I've started work on ISO9660. These drivers are read-
only by design and pretty limited, but they are sufficient for
booting and there's a framework that makes it easy to add more file
systems.
With these drivers loaded, all EFI apps can access ext2, ext3 and
ReiserFS volumes. That means you can load the kernel and even elilo
itself straight from the Linux root partition. (Side note: elilo has
built-in ext2 support, but it has an unfortunate bug that breaks it
on > 4 GB volumes on 32-bit platforms.) All you need on the EFI
System Partition (or on a HFS+ volume on Intel Macs) is the file
system drivers and something that loads them.
rEFIt itself has code to load file system drivers when it starts up.
With a full install of rEFIt 0.8, you can already load elilo and the
kernel from the Linux partition. I am quite aware though that some
people may not like rEFIt or have no use for it (i.e. Linux-only
systems or non-Apple EFI machines). That's why I've now also written
a small trampoline loader program. It's called dbounce ('d' for
driver). It loads all EFI drivers in a designated directory, then
chainloads the bootloader of your choice. The paths to both are
compiled in and are searched for on all accessible file systems.
With dbounce, you can put just dbounce.efi and fsw_ext2.efi on the
EFI System Partition, and have everything else on the Linux root
partition, under the distribution's package management. The same
approach may also work for bootable CDs in the future. Once the
ISO9660 driver is finished and we've figured out how to make EFI-
bootable El Torito entries for Intel Macs with current firmware(*),
the El Torito image would only need to contain dbounce and the
ISO9660 driver. That would make it much easier to rebuild these CDs,
since the content of the El Torito image would then be essentially
static.
Oh, and if you actually read all this, I'd like to hear from you.
I've been pretty quiet for the last few months, but I'm now set up
again in my new home, and I'd like to move elilo-based Linux booting
forward again. Working on this now could really pay off once UEFI-
capable PCs show up in the not-too-distant future.
- -chrisp
(*): The old "universal" = dual BIOS and EFI mactel-linux live CD
stopped working when Apple updated the firmware for Boot Camp. Making
it work again requires some experimentation into which flags and file
system arrangement the firmware needs for El Torito based EFI booting.
- --
chrisp a.k.a. Christoph Pfisterer "Any sufficiently advanced
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://chrisp.de bug is indistinguishable
PGP key & geek code available from a feature."
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