New UEFI guide on the wiki

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:52 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 4, 2014, at 12:49 PM, Andrew Lutomirski <luto at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 11:28 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 10:03 -0800, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
>>>
>>>> This reminds me: I *always* install with a GPT partition table, an ESP
>>>> partition, a BIOS Boot partition, and a smallish (1 or 2 GB) ext4
>>>> /boot near the beginning of the disk.  All Linuxes seem perfectly
>>>> happy to install this way (assuming you can figure out how to
>>>> partition the disk like that in the first place) and booting that way
>>>> in BIOS or EFI mode.  Given that this wastes at most a few MB, should
>>>> anaconda just partition like that by default?
>>>
>>> Definitely not. We tried doing BIOS installs to GPT disks by default in
>>> Fedora 16, and it was basically a complete disaster.
>>
>> What failed?
>
> Firmware face planted. For many it was the lack of an MBR entry with an active bit set, so there is now this PMBRboot flag where the 0xEE has an active bit set. And that pisses off other firmware. So it's no win.
>
>
>>  I'm guessing that userspace improvements since then have
>> mostly fixed this.
>
> It wasn't a user space problem. It was a firmware problem.
>
>
>>  I've never seen any problem on F18 (IIRC) and up
>> with GPT partition tables being BIOS-booted.  It seems to Just Work
>> (™).
>
> None are Lenova computers are they?

Nope.  In fact my only computer that I haven't done this to is Lenovo
(and that's only because it has a Windows-on-TrueCrypt dual boot
setup, and last time I checked that was fundamentally incompatible
with UEFI.

Anyway, point taken.  My revised RFE is at:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1061478

and my suggestion is now to just create both partitions when
installing to GPT.  Presumably if firmware can handle a GPT disk at
all, it won't care whether it happens to contain an ESP unless it's
actually trying to boot it using UEFI.

--Andy