Linux 5.7 Git Restores The Ability To EFI Boot Following Fallout In 5.7-rc1

If you tried out Linux 5.7-rc1 at the start of the week you may have found your system unbootable if using EFI... Fortunately, those EFI fixes have now been merged several days later.

Linux 5.7-rc1 shipped with seemingly botched EFI support, at least from my testing every x86_64 EFI system using the GRUB boot-loader yielded a failed boot.

Linux 5.7rc1 appears to be in bad shape for EFI support... pic.twitter.com/V6r6IJTCLa

— Phoronix (@phoronix) April 13, 2020

There have been fixes floating around in patch form while finally on Wednesday evening Linus Torvalds merged the urgent EFI fixes that includes "the boot failure regression caused by the BSS section not being cleared by the loaders." Those EFI fixes had been available on the mailing list since last Thursday but did not get pulled in time for Linux 5.7-rc1 or up until last night for that matter.

In any case, trying the latest Linux 5.7 Git as of this morning now yields booting systems on all of the AMD/Intel platforms that were failing earlier this week. Onwards to benchmarking. Those with extra time on their hands as a result of coronavirus social distancing can try the daily builds of Linux 5.7 on Ubuntu quite easily via this archive.