Debian Wants To Tackle UEFI, But They Need Your Help

[Erendiz]

I was not able to install Debian 8.1 Jessie, Ubuntu 15.04 and Fedora 22 on the ASUS X99 WS/IPMI motherboard with only UEFI support. Debian and Ubuntu live did neither work. Fedora live did work. Fedora gave me some hints during installation that there might be a Kernel issue.

I have now installed the latest Kali 2.0 distro, and surprisingly this worked! The main difference i see is that Kali is using Linux Kernel 4.0 and Debian for example 3.16.

I can write here several scenario's that i have seen passing by and all didn't work, but will not bother you with that.

[SteveMcIntyre]

I wonder why every distro has to repeat this on their own. Everything is supposed to be open source, why not take a look how other distros are doing it? UEFI has been supported by a lot them for ages.

Part of the point here is that we are going to be sharing the information across the distros. In discussion, UEFI developers from various distros have found that we all have our own bits of knowledge that we've not been sharing adequately so far. We're starting to build a knowledge base for ourselves at http://wiki.osdev.org/Broken_UEFI_implementations to solve this for the future.

[speculatrix]

Two things

Sony sold off the Vaio brand.

I have a Toshiba Click Mini. It doesn't give you a UEFI menu, just boots whatever the next boot tells it, or the first item in boot order, so you have to install rEFInd.
It will offer you USB boot off an SD card in the dock, but not off uSDHC card in the tablet so you have to put /boot in the eMMC, but that works quite well.

If you set UEFI boot timeout to more than 10 seconds you get a critical error when powering on which appears to lock it up, until you discover you need to connect a USB keyboard!

[GreatEmerald]

I emailed Asrock several times with the various issues. I didn't get the usual "Linux is not supported" spiel. They just simply didn't bother replying at all. Will not buy Asrock again.

Yeap, I emailed HP about the issue too, and the result was exactly that.

[gigaplex]

Asrock A75M-HVS here. Firmware version 1.80 worked okay with Linux, with the only major issue being that whenever I booted into Windows, the UEFI firmware automatically set Windows to be the default bootloader, requiring me to re-enter the firmware boot settings to get back to GRUB. My Asus board does not have this issue, so I don't think it's a Windows "feature" doing it on purpose. When firmware 2.0 came out (adding Windows 8 fast boot support) it broke Linux booting entirely - the kernel hung after GRUB handed off. Recent updates in either GRUB or the Linux kernel (not sure which one, but it was during the Debian Jessie testing timeframe) can successfully boot now, but I still avoid firmware 2.0 because the hotkey to enter the UEFI boot menu doesn't work - the screen flashes the boot menu briefly then it just gives up and drops down to a UEFI shell.

I emailed Asrock several times with the various issues. I didn't get the usual "Linux is not supported" spiel. They just simply didn't bother replying at all. Will not buy Asrock again.

[tinko]

Eh, it's not like Sony has anything against Linux. They're just incompetent across the board. See this little nugget: http://www.hardocp.com/news/2015/08/...0#.VcThf_D24-U

Well, Then they should go down.
That's funny of course, but on a more serious note: Seriously problematic stuff will get fixed for Windows and not for Linux. Sony is not to incompetent to implement a basic UEFI startup manager, they just don't care and f**k them for that. If they couldn't implement UEFI, they should go into the water energization stone business.

[bug77]

I shared the story at the specified link, I'll share it briefly here:

A friend of mine got an Sony Vaio Pro 13 (2013) Ultrabook (SVP1321). As soon as it finds something at the place at which the MS bootloader is to be expected, it will boot it, no matter what is configured anywhere. The only solution for dual boot is to move the MS bootloader, rename the Grub EFI file and load Windows via Grub. Obviously this has to be repeated, whenever some Windows upgrade affects the bootloader.

It might be considered extreme, but since then I urge everybody to boycott Sony completely. Even by just interpreting it as laziness, it's unacceptable for a >1000€ device. But I consider this a violation of the customers ability to chose an OS and it agitates me endlessly.



The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can boycott them and give them "nice" publicity on their facebook outlets. Unfortunately we live in a capitalist global economy and there is only one lingua franca that is understood by all big vendors.

Eh, it's not like Sony has anything against Linux. They're just incompetent across the board. See this little nugget: http://www.hardocp.com/news/2015/08/...0#.VcThf_D24-U

[eydee]

I wonder why every distro has to repeat this on their own. Everything is supposed to be open source, why not take a look how other distros are doing it? UEFI has been supported by a lot them for ages.

[tinko]

I shared the story at the specified link, I'll share it briefly here:

A friend of mine got an Sony Vaio Pro 13 (2013) Ultrabook (SVP1321). As soon as it finds something at the place at which the MS bootloader is to be expected, it will boot it, no matter what is configured anywhere. The only solution for dual boot is to move the MS bootloader, rename the Grub EFI file and load Windows via Grub. Obviously this has to be repeated, whenever some Windows upgrade affects the bootloader.

It might be considered extreme, but since then I urge everybody to boycott Sony completely. Even by just interpreting it as laziness, it's unacceptable for a >1000€ device. But I consider this a violation of the customers ability to chose an OS and it agitates me endlessly.

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can write emails to uge them to fix the problems

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can boycott them and give them "nice" publicity on their facebook outlets. Unfortunately we live in a capitalist global economy and there is only one lingua franca that is understood by all big vendors.

[bug77]

The should give us the list with vendors with bad implementation so we can write emails to urge them to fix the problems

It's been done before. The standard response is that Linux is not a supported OS, therefore they won't do anything to fix the problems. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=998150