swapping disk with UEFI hardware - a dead end?

[Peter Jones]

On 06/28/2012 12:17 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:

> It is perturbing that in 2012, with a nearly 30MB operating system as a
> pre-boot environment, that by design it doesn't scan the EFI System
> partition for other possible boot options - like a rescue mode - in the event
> efi boot variables aren't set.

Well, as a matter of fact, if you read upthread, as of 2.3.1 it launches
/boot/efi/boot${ARCH}.efi in this case.  We weren't prepared for it, and so
we're a little behind, but we've got a plan and we're going to do something
about it.

> Apple hardware does just such a scan. If I blow away every bit of information
> in NVRAM, the firmware still scans available disks, and chooses a reasonable
> default as fallback. Even in the case when Apple's bootloader isn't present.

I bet you their reasonable default doesn't seem as good if you're normally
dual-booting and using grub to chain-load apple's loader.  I bet it's 50/50
based on some criteria we haven't tried to figure out.

> So after all of this UEFI complexity and baggage, we still need rescue media
> in the example case? That is unbelievably stupid. The Lenovo case is either a
> bug or it's bad design or they enjoy creating user hostile hardware.

As lennart, myself, and mjg59 all made perfectly clear - this is our bug; it's
possible to do this according to spec (though it could be better), and we're
just not doing it yet.

-- 
         Peter