Wondering if anyone has managed to get Xen to boot from UEFI?
We have a relatively new server with a Supermicro X11SSH-F mainboard with an M.2
SSD. If we switch the boot mode to Legacy in the BIOS no boot devices show up.
The vendor says this is because M.2 SSD is only supported in UEFI mode. We even
tried installing some spinning SATA drives and a USB thumb drive but those
don't show up as bootable either in legacy mode.
Trying to boot Xen 4.6 from the centos-release-xen repo results in:
Loading Xen 4.6.6-8.el7
error: can't find command 'multiboot'.
Loading Linux 4.9.75-29.el7.x86_64 ...
error: can't find command 'module'.
Loading initial ramdisk ...
error: can't find command 'module'.
Press any key to continue ...
From what I've read we need to compile xen.efi and boot it natively.
I found this: https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Xen_EFI#Compiling_Xen_as_EFI
Which sugests binutils doesn't support PE (EFI), which looks to be the case
with the stock version on CentOS 7, note missing i386pe from the list of
supported emulations:
# ld -V
GNU ld version 2.25.1-32.base.el7_4.2
Supported emulations:
elf_x86_64
elf32_x86_64
elf_i386
i386linux
elf_l1om
elf_k1om
I downloaded binutils 2.30 from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/ and built it
with:
yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
tar xzf binutils-2.30.tar.gz
cd binutils-2.30
./configure --enable-targets=x86_64-pep
make
make install
Now I have a version that supports i386pe:
# /usr/local/bin/ld -V
GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.30
Supported emulations:
elf_x86_64
elf32_x86_64
elf_i386
elf_iamcu
i386linux
elf_l1om
elf_k1om
i386pep
i386pe
However at this point I guess I need to rebuild Xen from source in order to
obtain the xen.efi binary, and I'm not sure how to do that.
Am I on the right path? Any tips on how to recompile Xen to get xen.efi binary?
Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Chris
--
Chris Wik
Anu Internet Services
www.cwik.ch | www.anu.net
