RFC: EFI System partition and native EFI binaries (xen.efi, vmlinuz.efi, etc)

[Jacek Konieczny]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 01:50:39PM +0100, Jacek Konieczny wrote:
> Any thoughts? Does anybody know how other distros solve this problem?

I have not expected such a heated discussion here… thanks for all your
comments and suggestions…

So I have created another monster – the 'efi-boot-update' script.
Packages providing EFI boot loaders install them to the
/lib/efi/{ia32,x64} directories and their configuration files to the
/etc/efi-boot/ directory. Additionally, an efi-boot-update configuration
files are provided in the /etc/efi-boot/update.d directory which
describe what files should be copied to the EFI partition for each boot
loader and what boot manager label to use.

/etc/efi-boot/update.conf file is used to define the boot order and
other global options for the efi-boot-update scripts. Everything seems
to work good enough for me. It would be great if anybody else could test
this too and tell if it makes sense.

The packages supporting efi-boot-update now:
– xen-efi 4.2.0-1 (xen.spec)
– elilo 3.14-2 (elilo.spec)
– efi-shell-{ia32,x64) 2.0 (efi-shell.spec)

Additionally, the efi-boot-update script contains a configuration file
to set a boot manager entry for GRUB2 installed as usual with
'grub-install'.

TODO:
- if this really makes sense, then the /lib/efi/{ia32,x64} and
  /etc/efi-boot/  directories should be probably moved to the filesystem
  package.

I will also try to write wiki page about EFI boot.

Greets,
        Jacek