Debian amd64 EFI test CD, build 3

Last updated: 24th November 2012

These images have been superseded - since the Wheezy d-i beta 3 release, amd64 CD images have all been made including EFI support. If you have any problems, please try official release / beta images instead - I'm now much more interested in finding and fixing bugs in those.

What's here?

This is a third build of a netinst CD with experimental EFI support included. This image should boot and work in EFI mode on a recent amd64 (x86_64) machine, doing the following steps differently:

• boot via UEFI rather than BIOS mode
• use GPT partitioning on hard disks rather than MSDOS
• add a FAT-formatted EFI partition for booting
• install an EFI bootloader rather than lilo/grub-pc

This CD image is a test build, made using some experimental test code in debian-cd (SVN branch here) and some tweaked packages in debian-installer. I've sent diffs to the debian-boot mailing list, full source and binary packages in the bits directory here. Nothing has changed in terms of packages since build 2, but I've tweaked the CD creation scripts.

Known issues and changes since test 2

This is an experimental build, so bugs and mistakes are quite likely! Nonetheless, in my own testing (in a VM using OVMF, and on a recent desktop machine) it seems to work ok. Here's a list of the known issues and limitations that have been found:

• The image will now work on a USB key, as well as when written to a CD or used as a CD image in a VM. I've tweaked the CD image creation scripts to add a small FAT partition containing the EFI loader. Works for me! :-)
• I also found a bug I introduced in test build 2 - the El Torito boot images were included in the wrong order. That meant that while EFI boot would work from a CD, old-style BIOS boot wouldn't. Now fixed.

If you have EFI hardware, please try this image and let me know how you get on, via the debian-cd and debian-boot mailing lists.

Steve McIntyre

	Name	Last modified	Size
	Parent Directory		-
	bits/	2012-08-22 01:53	-
	debian-wheezy-amd64-efi-test3.iso	2012-08-24 01:01	235M