swapping disk with UEFI hardware - a dead end?

[Peter Jones]

On 06/28/2012 05:03 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> On Jun 28, 2012, at 1:59 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>
>> The only obvious thing for it to boot is EFI/BOOT/BOOT${ARCH}.efi.
>
> An optional file in an optional vendor subdirectory is the obvious choice? Maybe a future spec could be more clear that the subdirectory and an EFI image in it are required, who should provide it, and that it should be used first in the case of invalid or missing BootOrder variables in NVRAM.
>
> This is still in between ambiguous and optional in 2.3.1.
>
>> Booting the first EFI executable you find on a drive is not a sensible
>> thing to do.
>
> Puking in the face of the user with an incoherent boot failure message is
> more sensible than trying the singular boot loader on the available
> non-removable drive?

There's no way to know if a UEFI application is a boot loader.  You're as
likely to accidentally run a firmware raid setup utility or the debug programs
we put there with gnu-efi.

>
> I admit this strategy can also cause problems, and the UEFI spec isn't
> particularly helpful[1] in resolving the problem of removed operating
> systems, with residual boot loaders that point to them. But that is no worse,
> and still likely to generate a more coherent boot loader produced "can't find
> blah" message, than the OP's experienced rat race of an error message.

The UEFI spec is in fact quite helpful, we just haven't done the thing it says
to do yet.

-- 
         Peter