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Author Topic: Boot from Syslinux in EFI mode  (Read 2617 times)

Offline batya

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Boot from Syslinux in EFI mode
« on: March 05, 2015, 03:20:57 AM »
Hi, I'm new to Tiny Core, I'm trying to install it locally on my desktop since I have a spare partition there.

On my system I first boot Gummiboot loader, then I boot Syslinux from Gummiboot and then trying to boot Tiny Core.
Gummiboot can't boot Tiny Core directly since vmlinuz there is not an EFI binary (CONFIG_EFI_STUB is not set in kernel config).

syslinux.cfg which sits on my ESP partition looks simple:
DEFAULT tinycore
LINUX /tinycore/vmlinuz
INITRD /tinycore/core.gz
APPEND loglevel=3 tce=sda2

vmlinuz and core.gz sit on the ESP partition.
tce directory is on next partition (sda2).

After the boot is initiated from Syslinux, I only see a flash of text probably saying "Loading vmlinuz" and "Loading core.gz" (it's too fast, I can't read).
Then my system reboots in a couple of seconds.

If I replace "LINUX /tinycore/vmlinuz" with a different kernel and remove "INITRD", that kernel boots fine.

I did not take syslinux from tinycore (there's no EFI version) but from official Syslinux builds.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

Offline pq5190362

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Re: Boot from Syslinux in EFI mode
« Reply #1 on: March 05, 2015, 04:01:12 AM »

Offline Juanito

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Re: Boot from Syslinux in EFI mode
« Reply #2 on: March 05, 2015, 04:23:45 AM »
tc will uefi boot using grub2, but I never tried with syslinux.

Note that you need to check if your machine uses 32-bit or 64-bit uefi and use the appropriate version of tc - core for 32-bit and corepure64 for 64-bit.

Almost all (if not all) pc use 64-bit uefi, whereas some (older) mac use 32-bit efi and the rest use 64-bit efi.

Edit: Note also that the display will be blank if you don't load an efi-fb or the graphics-KERNEL and Xorg-7.7/Xfbdev extensions
« Last Edit: March 05, 2015, 04:30:44 AM by Juanito »

Offline curaga

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Re: Boot from Syslinux in EFI mode
« Reply #3 on: March 05, 2015, 05:52:04 AM »
FYI, EFI_STUB is enabled in both 5.x and 6.x kernels.
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.

Offline batya

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Re: Boot from Syslinux in EFI mode
« Reply #4 on: March 06, 2015, 01:13:49 AM »
Ok, I see, Gummiboot was printing the error message "Unsupported" with TC kernel, so it was because of its 32-bittness, not because of not having the stub.