UEFI booting

[greg]

Recent hardware platforms have started supporting booting using the UEFI specification, the replacement for BIOS (for instance, motherboards for the Sandy Bridge architecture). Many Linux distro are starting to support that. For info, there is a good overview over at the ArchLinux wiki here.

It would be nice if SystemRescueCD supported UEFI Booting, which would mean that it would be possible to use SysRescCD to install a UEFI-bootable Linux distro and repair a UEFI bootloader.

Actually, SysRescCD comes already with support for UEFI in the kernel config and ships with the efibootmgr tool, so it seems that there is some support already... but to make this support effective it is required that the CD is booted in UEFI mode. More specifically, if the CD is not booted in UEFI mode, the kernel will not be able to expose the UEFI variables through /sys/firmware/efi, and it will not be possible to use efibootmgr to install a bootloader or modify existing boot entries.

There are instructions on how to create a UEFI-bootable iso here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pjones/BootableCDsForBIOSAndUEFI
I suppose this could be a starting point, implying some changes to the "isogen" function used by SysRescCD, but I admit I am not an expert and I don't know exactly what this would entail.

So, maybe UEFI support can be considered for future releases? Of course I wouldn't mind doing some testing if this will be the case.