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IsaacSchemm / MultiCD

A shell script package for creating combination disks from Linux ISOs.
http://multicd.us
212 stars 47 forks source link

Does not work with UEFI #39

Open IsaacSchemm opened 8 years ago

IsaacSchemm commented 8 years ago

I haven't done any work to get this working on UEFI. At this point, I doubt I'll get around to it.

Dimensional commented 7 years ago

UEFI doesn't use the same boot loader as syslinux. While syslinux is MBR related, UEFI instead looks for records found in the EFI folder located in the root of the disc image. What I don't know is if the files found in there are hard coded with menu entries, or if it acquires them from the same place as syslinux. If it's the latter, then it simply is a matter of adding the EFI folder contents to the root of multicd.iso and then moving the grub files to another location.

Most systems now days have Secure Boot on, and it must stay on for folks with Windows 8+ installed, meaning the EFI bootloaders must be signed, so editing them would probably make booting fail regardless.

Dimensional commented 6 years ago

I've actually been reviewing how EFI works, even with secure boot, for a PXE Boot server and it appears that all you really need is 1 or 2 signed efi files. Just look at the instructions for UEFI Secure Boot and PXE. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot/PXE-IPv6?action=show&redirect=UEFI%2FSecureBoot-PXE-IPv6

Some distributions may not work on UEFI mode, so they would have to be limited to isolinux menu entries, but distros such as Caine9.0 could theoretically be used as the entrypoint for UEFI and SecureBoot. The only downside is it appears the UEFI menus have to be monolithic and can't be separated into their own cfg files, but they can still be made into their own SubMenus, which you can see examples on any recently UEFI installed linux's grub.cfg file, like Ubuntu.

IsaacSchemm commented 6 years ago

I don't have the time/motivation to work on this at the moment (the only machines I have anything besides Windows running on, I've flipped into BIOS mode, so there's not a real pressing need for me), but if you submit a pull request or a patch, I could certainly try it out.

Dimensional commented 6 years ago

That would be a massive feat to perform to get all EFI supported, mainly due to how many different distros are currently supported in the repo, not to mention how out of date the plugins are for some newer versions. Still, I'll take a look at some that I could possibly work on.