uefi: What if ...?

[lee]

Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> writes:

> On May 26, 2014, at 4:09 PM, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> 
>> what if I got a new mainboard which uses uefi --- and might not even
>> support disabling or not using uefi --- and wanted to boot?
>> 
>> Booting is from a HP smart array P800.  Would that work?  Would I need
>> to do something to get it to work, and if so, what?
>
> I think you'd have to ask HP about whether there's UEFI driver support on the P800. If not, then I'd expect the firmware won't see it at boot time. Maybe the kernel driver for the P800 will see it after booting, however, I'm not sure.

It needs special drivers for all the installed hardware?

My current board, without uefi, supports it as is, and I can only expect
to do at least as good or better from a new one ...

> As for the partition scheme and bootloader installation and bootloader
> configuration files, those are completely different between BIOS and
> UEFI systems. It's much easier to tell you to just reinstall the
> system than to explain how to do an in place conversion.

Well, I definitely do not want to re-install.  Aren`t there any
conversion tools?

> The gist would be to boot from the new computer, using rescue mode,
> [...]

Thank you for the explanation!  It sounds easier than re-installing ...

> The trick will be whether the firmware sees the array in the pre-boot
> UEFI environment.

A board that doesn`t would be pretty useless.

> If not, then it might be possible to do this with a small boot drive,
> even a USB stick, with an ESP and a boot partition containing the
> kernel and initramfs, while the root file system remains on the array
> to complete the start up process.

And that defeats the purpose of RAID.

Considering the problems and security issues involved, I can only hope
that this uefi crap will be replaced with something decent sooner than
later and try to sit it out in the meantime.


BTW, how do people deal with the security issues uefi introduces, like
by running it`s own network stuff to potentially undermine firewalls and
transmit data uncontrollably?


-- 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)