Re: [gentoo-user] New PC, new boot concepts

[Daniel Frey]

On 12/19/2014 07:22 AM, Mick wrote:
> I'll be taking my time to google, read and make appropriate selections, so
> please bear with me while I start relevant threads as necessary to complement
> my sparse knowledge in these topics.  Starting from the top, with this thread
> I am trying to find out what is considered good practice as far as UEFI/MBR
> and boot management goes.

I got myself an Intel NUC some months ago and ran into this problem. I
wound up using UEFI+GPT with grub2 and had no issues, other than
learning new grub2 syntax. I didn't like the idea of it scanning
automatically and adding new entries.

> The MoBo is capable of booting in CMS mode, but I am not sure if there are any
> benefits in creating a 2MB partition for a conventional MBR bootloader, or I
> should forego MBR altogether and go directly with a GPT FAT32 EFI System
> Partition (ESP).

Keep in mind that your motherboard may have to boot in UEFI to get
access to features. For example, my NUC's hdmi audio will not work
booted in CMS mode.

> If the latter is the way to go and I forget all things I ever learned about
> MBR, does the 550MB FAT32 ESP partition have to be at the beginning of the
> drive?
>
> Is it beneficial to install a Linux boot loader/manager like GRUB2, or rEFInd,
> etc., or should I just use the kernel EFI Boot Stub to boot gentoo with?  The
> PC will single boot in Gentoo, although I may drop in a sysrescuecd image for
> recovery purposes and would be nice to be able to boot this straight off the
> disk, without having to burn it on a CDROM.  Is it simply a matter of adding
> the LiveCD iso in the ESP with a .efi suffix, or will I need to use efibootmgr
> to inform the UEFI about *any* kernel images in the ESP other than the default
> EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi?

I found it useful to have grub2 for testing new kernels. I set up this
box mostly as an appliance (mythtv frontend) but sometimes booting to
recovery etc is useful. Especially since you can boot a Mint ISO with
UEFI support when something barfs.

> Finally, what's your opinion on 'secure boot'?  I'm mostly thinking of its
> benefit as a pre-boot malware protection utility, but I don't want to
> introduce too much complexity which may make recovery of my data difficult in
> the future.  I've heard some horror stories resulting from NVRAM corruption,
> or flashing with new UEFI firmware rendering the PC unbootable, etc. but don't
> know if this is due to user error.  If you have experience using secure boot
> what is your preferred method?

I didn't bother with it.

>
> Any other pointers and gotchas I should be careful with?

Only thing I screwed up with when messing around with my new NUC was I
set the grub platform incorrectly. I used pc-x86_64 instead of efi-64 (I
think, it's been a while.) Once I had the grub platform set properly the
install went well.

Dan