Hi, I would like to see a document that explain how to install Gentoo using a UEFI motherboard. Also, it would be nice to see how to start a kernel using UEFI+Grub2 and also UEFI+Kernel stub. Finally, it seems that we need to use efibootmgr too. I'm actually learning how to do that, but I need help, because I can't test it right now on my current box. Reproducible: Always
this is possibly a duplicate of bug #439276; see https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439276#c3. basically, we need to add a whole bunch of updates for modern hardware, but as i haven't yet rebuilt my box with all that stuff, i don't have a clear idea how to proceed. we can't really do something about this until we know the right procedures. note that grub2 and efibootmgr are not stable, so we cannot document anything in the handbook that is ~arch only. you'd need to talk to the arch teams to get those packages stabilized.
(In reply to comment #1) > note that grub2 and efibootmgr are not stable, so we cannot document > anything in the handbook that is ~arch only. you'd need to talk to the arch > teams to get those packages stabilized. If I don't misremember, fedora is using grub-legacy+patches to get UEFI support, maybe they could be included in our old grub ebuilds :/
As I don't have a UEFI capable laptop yet either, can you tell us what we really need to have documented right now? The instructions on GPT partition layout have been added and improved; GRUB2 is now the recommended boot loader and a BIOS boot partition is taken up in the instructions as well. It would be really helpful if a wiki page or other document could be created with the delta's that we can pick from. Keep in mind that we should focus on the essentials here, not on the 1001 possible setups and so on.
Having just gone through the pain of doing just this I was about to file my own report, but I am happy to add to this one. It would be nice if some of the UEFI process was at least noted in the main guides. For example noting the changes to the partition table you need to apply, and kernel config changes that will allow you do forget using GRUB, i.e. setting the command line to include root=PARTUUID=.... I found these two pages helpful, although I have 4 partitions but I could have got away with just the three as I have not got grub2 installed as it kept failing with a kernel panic, I am guessing my system might have an old version of EFI based booting, so does not support the manager side, and I did not need to put the kernel onto a usb stick to get things running. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/UEFI_Gentoo_Quick_Install_Guide http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2
I updated the installation instructions to inform about EFI as well. Hopefully this makes for a good start, and additional suggestions can be made by other developers with more experience on it (I do use UEFI, but with gummiboot as boot loader instead of directly using the EFI variables to boot kernels).
