search

NixOS / nixpkgs

Nix Packages collection & NixOS
MIT License
17.66k stars 13.81k forks source link

Documentation: Mixed Mode Booting with systemd-boot #277181

Open techyporcupine opened 9 months ago

techyporcupine commented 9 months ago

Problem

While attempting to install NixOS on an older Windows Tablet, I ran across the issue that NixOS does not provide any 32bit EFI files for a 64bit install of the OS, and this tablet requires 32bit EFI files, and I would like to run the 64bit version of NixOS. I found this section of the bootloader wiki, but the issue with this is that after GRUB 2.06, booting ia32 EFI's is broken. That wiki page that I just linked seems to indicate that booting ia32 EFI's is possible with systemd-boot, but I could not find any documentation on how to do that. I'm not even sure that NixOS has built systemd-boot with mixed mode even enabled (I also don't know if you even need to enable it). I'm just hoping for some guidance on how to get this to work.

I'll ping the systemd-boot maintainer here in case he has any input. @JulienMalka

Checklist

Add a :+1: reaction to issues you find important.

JulienMalka commented 9 months ago

This usecase is not supported currently with systemd-boot. From my understanding, installing systemd-boot from a 32bit bootctl version would do what you want but getting there might requires ugly hacks.

techyporcupine commented 9 months ago

Oh, so is this implying that you need to do some workarounds to make it work? I thought it meant that systemd-boot supports it natively without any workarounds. I think I read that Arch is building with 32 and 64 efi's and systemd-boot, I wonder how they're doing it.