Debian jessie EFI test CDs, build 3

Last updated: 11th January 2015

What's here?

This is a freshly-built i386/amd64 (32- and 64-bit) netinst CD with UEFI support included. It's quite hacky for now, but if you have one of the Bay Trail-based machines I blogged about, such as the Asus X205TA, then this CD should be a very good start for you. This will support booting on a whole range of UEFI machines, and should offer a choice of 32- and 64-bit installation. I've added a few other things since my last build (jessie-upload2):

• a patch to the Linux kernel to add a new /sys file which exposes the size of the underlying UEFI platform (32- or 64-bit).
• a patch to grub2 to read that new /sys file in grub-install to determine the right version of grub-efi to install by default
• a patch to grub-installer to do similar

These remove the manual steps that were necessary for a 64-bit installation with the previous build. I've just used this exact image (and a network mirror) to install a fully-functional 64-bit Gnome system on the X205TA, simply by selecting "64-bit install" from the GRUB menu and following prompts. Yay!

Now, there's no guarantee that the kernel patch I've submitted to the linux-efi folks will be accepted in its current form, and even if it is I'll have to get it and the other code I've written accepted into the various packages and then into Jessie! But for now this image should work just fine for Bay Trail folks I hope!

There are still some other gotchas, so, as always: WARNING: this CD is provided for testing only. Use at your own risk! If you try this on an early Intel-based Mac, it will not work. Otherwise, this should likely work for most folks using 32-bit or 64-bit x86 hardware just like any other Debian Jessie daily netinst build.

If you have appropriate 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		-
	debian-jessie-UEFI-testing-netinst-i386-amd64-build3.iso	2015-01-11 01:23	590M