UEFI Boot

[coreplayer2]

Anyhow, I'm going to bed..   good luck Juanito  we're hoping you'll crack this some more

[Juanito]

and got a response like  "Loading Kernel"

yet the process seems to hang up after "Loading initrd"

I've never managed to get anything echoed to the terminal once the boot process starts, so you're doing better than I am.

I didn't have any driver though not Xvesa or XFBdev, so maybe that was the problem.

The key for me seemed to be loading graphics-3.0.21-tinycore "onboot" so that the terminal switched into kmode - it's only at this point that I see something on the screen again.

Of course, this might be an issue specific to intel hd3000 graphics, which is common both to the dell e6220 and the mac mini.

[curaga]

EFI does not have a text mode, bios has the VGA text mode to fall back on. To see an EFI console either use KMS as you found or the VESA framebuffer, vga=792 and so on.

Note that it doesn't matter what resolution you give to the vga argument, the efi fb will be the screen's native resolution anyway.


Also, too bad to hear Dell's EFI doesn't do USB sticks as nicely as Apple's.

[Juanito]

EFI does not have a text mode, bios has the VGA text mode to fall back on. To see an EFI console either use KMS as you found or the VESA framebuffer, vga=792 and so on.

No amount of messing around seems to fix this - I'm wondering if some obscure setpci command is required to get the video going...

Also, too bad to hear Dell's EFI doesn't do USB sticks as nicely as Apple's.

I spoke too soon, it remembers the uefi setting now - even when I switch to bios mode and back again 

[curaga]

You still had to add an entry, as it's a removable device it should just be shown in a list if it's there, just like in most bioses.

[coreplayer2]

now that I think about it, I remember trying to boot a remaster which included XFBdev extension,  however I don't believe I entered the vge=791 boot option that i normally use with it..

Will have to give this a try asap

[Juanito]

What's puzzling me is that I'm using the same usb stick for both laptop and mac.

Since the laptop boots from the usb stick (albeit with uefi v2.x), you'd think the mac would boot from the same usb stick (albeit with efi v1.x).

I edit grub.cfg once booted to the grub prompt on the mac to allow for the fact that the mac finds the usb stick at (hd2,gpt1) instead of (hd1,gpt1) on the laptop, but everything else should be the same.

Both laptop and mac have intel hd3000 graphics, so you'd think that when graphics-3.0.21-tinycore loads "onboot" on the mac, messages would become visible again on the screen as they do on the laptop.

Without anything to go on, I'm assuming the mac boot doesn't get as far as loading extensions - using vga=792 (or similar) does not change anything - but I have no way of knowing for sure...

[coreplayer2]

Well, I of course attempted to boot vmlinuz + core.gz  remastered with the frame buffer driver using the boot code vga=791, no change..   Still hangs without any way of establishing why, no log's or onscreen indication.

I find it easier to boot grub2 without a config file and enter the commands manually at the grub command line.

I'm still working on creating a bootable efi aware cd image of core, bootable by grub2.   If Ubuntu and Mint can be successful 100% of the time, I mean neither ever fail to boot, you'd think we too should be able to accomplish this small task. 




 

[coreplayer2]

Am reading about the race condition, and UGA resolution.  Are either of these a factor.?   I have a feeling that only a new kernel is going to fix this lock up at boot.

[Juanito]

Are you trying to boot on a mac or a pc?

As mentioned earlier, I have efi boot working on a pc, but not on a mac.

On the mac mini (which uses 64bit efi), I get two results:

usb stick: boots to grub and then I get a blank screen when booting the kernel
hd: boots to grub and then to X, but usb keyboard/mouse do not work.

The usb stick is the same one that boots using uefi on the pc, the hd is the same one that boots without problems using rEFIt/grub legacy.

I'm using the latest mac mini firmware.

[coreplayer2]

At this time am only interested in booting a Mac with tinycore from a USB stick, whether there is a internal drive installed on the mac itself is of no importance.  To make file editing easier I sometimes connect a drive with OSX 10.7.4 installed on it.   Having said that, it's only a question of time before all new pc's use EFI, I would say at least withing two years.

Strange thing, one day I accidentally grabbed the wrong drive and connected it to the macbook,  on start it booted up into Windows 7 immediately without any issue on the macbook, next time I looked the system was loading new drivers (the drive had been temporarily removed from a windows pc.. ) lol

Anyhow, back to core..   is there a way to verify that linux has been compiled with the efi flag ?

As an experiment, I installed rEFIt to a USBstick with tc and elilo.efi, which at least loads vmlinuz and core.gz but crashes then promptly reboots before I can figure out why.

update, having better success with vmlinuz64 & core64.gz  but still no cigar

[Juanito]

Some incremental progress in that this allows the usb stick tc boot partition to be found automatically on both laptop and mac mini (where the uuid is the partition id).

Code: [Select]

search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root e94de7a3-149b-4554-bc02-6129467534a9

menuentry "core" {
  linux /boot/vmlinuz quiet noswap tce=UUID=e94de7a3-149b-4554-bc02-6129467534a9 tz=GMT-4 host=boxdell blacklist=bcma blacklist=ssb blacklist=b43 text
  initrd /boot/core.gz
}
..but no progress in booting the mac mini (and the results are the same with core/core64)

[curaga]

Anyhow, back to core..   is there a way to verify that linux has been compiled with the efi flag ?

The config files are at release/src/kernel at any mirror. CONFIG_EFI is indeed disabled, rather curious how it didn't affect my booting.

edit: Maybe the grub2 config file/bootx64.efi included fakebios. Can't remember.

[Juanito]

I've tried "fakebios" without any positive result on the mac and plan to try kernel boot codes "noefi" and "add_efi_memmap" next chance I get.

Is your mac efi 32bit or 64bit (mine is 64bit)? I saw a couple of comments implying that only pure 64bit distros would work on some 64bit efi macs - however, both core and core64 work on the 64bit uefi laptop.

[curaga]

I think it's 64, since I used bootx64.efi - isn't the 32-bit one named differently?