I was thinking of trying out the UEFI support that HP has in my laptop BIOS in the next few days.
My reasons is that I get a custom boot logo… and (hopefully) a better boot-speed.
What is the current state of affairs with the openSuSE UEFI/EFI install support on a empty hdd for x86_64 does anyone know?
(badly worded I apologize)
This may seem naive but I have struggled to answer this with most posts being about Mac’s for obvious reasons.
Specifically,
Do I have to have any custom knowledge on formatting the HDD with a GPT partitions or does the installer do this for you?
Secondly,
How well does the UEFI bootloader tie in with the config tools in YaST2?
(I would like to have UEFI but if it turns into some headache in setting up the boot area by hand each time the kernel updates I will forget it.)
I can safely say this will be a machine with only openSuSE installed as an OS, no need for any others or any dual-boot problems.
This isn’t overly urgent and I will dedicate (at least) a whole weekend to tweaking once I buy a new disk and install openSuSE on it.
If nobody knows then I will dive in head first and report how I find it and any problems (and severity).
Thanks for any feedback and sorry for a slightly long post on a ‘simple’ question,
which kida confuses me as to why the EFI image is on the x86_64 dvd… but I imagine that’s got something to do with Mac machines…
U/EFI on the other hand does look promising, but I refuse to go back to x86 just for the one feature, the improvements I get on the programs I run day to day (scientific HPC type progs) is worth more than EFI imo
well as soon as UEFI supports x86_64, and we all have moved to 64bit with flying cars I may try messing around with another form of booting…
Needless to say I am interested in more advanced booting and my next new toy will likely be something that runs coreboot(or whatever it’s branding is now) or will (more likely) be an instant on ARM toy, I just hope openSuSE supports ARM install by then
I was surfing the web and noted this BBC news article claiming UEFI fitted (new) PCs will start becoming more dominant than BIOS fitted (new) PCs in 2011. Purported UEFI will offer significantly faster boot times. I don’t know enough to assess whether that is accurate, but it does make me wonder about Linux compatibility. I read in a wiki article that Linux has been able to use EFI at boot time since early 2000, using the elilo EFI boot loader or, more recently, EFI versions of GRUB. I don’t see an openSUSE “grub-efi” package, so if there is such a beast, it likely goes by a different package name.
A search on FATE did not provide any more information, although I noted from surfing there is a packaged called “elilo” that handles EFI boot. openSUSE has v.3.8 of elilo.
Novell have information on using UEFI with SLED/SLES-11, but I do not recall reading any openSUSE success stories.
So I am curious, … just what IS the current status ? Does elilo work with grub? Grub? Or is it its own boot loader?
Is this something that openSUSE needs to apply attention to (assuming that BBC article is correct, which it may not be (correct)) ?
My understanding is that EFI replaces BIOS as the interface between hardware and software.
IMHO, I doubt there will be major software changes needed by existing software (Mac OSx, Linux, Microsoft Windows) to be installed on EFI enabled laptops or desktops.
According to Wikipedia EFI has been running on Intel and HP Itanium processors since 2000. Linux has been running with Grub since 2000.
It makes me think it may be worthwhile to write an openFate submission (perhaps using the URL you provided to give guidance), requesting that the capability to use grub2 with EFI support should included in a future openSUSE release (possibly openSUSE-12.0).
I don’t remember exactly where I read it from but it was mentioned somewhere that openSUSE11.2 would not consider packaging grub2. I agree, it is high time now to include EFI support.
