Debian EFI test CDs, build 4

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These images have been superseded - since the Wheezy d-i beta 3 release, amd64 CD images have all been made including EFI support.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. If you're looking for i386 EFI, please continue here...

What's here?

This is a fourth build of netinst CDs with experimental EFI support included. For the first time, I've included i386 support as well as just amd64. The amd64 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

These CD images are 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 major has changed in terms of packages since build 3 (essentially just a rebase onto current d-i code), but I've tweaked the CD creation scripts more.

Known issues and changes since test 3

The big thing is that I've made more changes in debian-cd to allow for i386 EFI too. The amd64 CD should not look substantially different to previously, but I'm including an updated build to help verify that. And I'm hoping that a new multi-arch build will work for people too, booting and installling correctly for both amd64 and i386 users.

The i386 test CD may work OK on some of the existing i386 EFI machines, but is much less tested than amd64 at this point. Please help to test this if you can, but beware that 32-bit EFI is much less likely to work reliably, e.g. on older 32-bit Intel Apple Macintosh machines. It works in a VM for me using a 32-bit OVMF build, but I have no physical 32-bit EFI hardware to test with. So, be careful - I'm giving no warranty on this code...!

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/	2012-09-03 01:18	-
	debian-wheezy-i386-efi-test4.iso	2012-09-02 22:45	267M
	debian-wheezy-amd64-efi-test4.iso	2012-09-02 22:40	239M
	debian-wheezy-amd64-i386-MA-efi-test4.iso	2012-09-02 22:36	500M