[syslinux] Changes to get CD to boot on EFI System.

H. Peter Anvin
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 13:19:45 -0000

On 04/02/16 04:18, Thomas Schmitt via Syslinux wrote:
>
> I may have asked this already years ago. The long intervals between
> the discussions of this topic do not help me with keeping track.
> Whatever, now i have quite usable qemu-system-x86_64 and OVMF.fd of
> Debian 8. So i could pack a partition image into an ISO as EFI El Torito
> image and look whether it gives some signs of life as virtual CD-ROM.
>
>
>> At this point, some reader could interpret Peter's words as if this
>> situation could actually be successfully achieved.
>
> I explicitely asked him for clarification.
>
> Ping ?
>
>
>> I hope the current status would be improved in the (near) future.
>
> At least we need to put some tangible beef to the explanation of
> isohybrid.c option --uefi in the wiki.
>
> It would be helpful to get a hint from hpa, about what situation shall
> be described in the isohybrid wiki.
>
> Where any plans or decisions made when mjg implemented --uefi ?
> At that time it must have been obvious that Fedora Live CD would boot
> GRUB2 via EFI and not SYSLINUX.
>

I'm afraid I don't actually know a whole lot.  At the time, I didn't
have any system on which I could attempt to test this.  I do now, but
haven't had a chance to look at it.

I'm not sure which is the intent of the El Torito spec and perhaps more
importantly, what reality looks like, w.r.t. UEFI - whether it expects
that the boot image is a partition or an EFI executable.

In the latter case, syslinux.efi is probably 99% there.

	-hpa