efibootmgr 0.4.2-test1

Announcing efibootmgr 0.4.2-test1. If you have systems you can test this on, please do so. It appears to work fine on my BigSur.

* Thu Jul 31 2003 Matt Domsch <[email protected]>
- Applied patch from Dann Frazier to enable creating netboot entries.
- update AUTHORS with Dann's netboot contribution.
- Until we can get the ACPI HID and UID programatically, make the user pass them in when creating a netboot entry.
- Add O_DIRECT support for reading the disk.
- Fix unparse_hardware_path() for the PCI case - the device and function values were printed in reverse order.
- Fix the README file to reflect all the options that can be passed, and add a new item for netboot entries.
- whitespace cleanups

If there are no problems with this, I'd like to also fix up the unaligned access messages that the kernel prints when this creates new boot entries, but I wanted to clear the plate of this stuff first.

The netboot entries are kind of interesting. Dann added the -i <interface> option, but we don't know a programatic way to get ahold of the ACPI HID and UID information for the device path, so we make the user pass it in. That can be removed if we find an automated method for determining it. The README gives examples of what to use:

6) A system administrator wants to create a boot option to network boot (PXE). Unfortunately, this requires knowing a little more information about your system than can be easily found by efibootmgr, so you've got to pass additional information - the ACPI HID and UID values. These can generally be found by using the EFI Boot Manager (in the EFI environment) to create a network boot entry, then using efibootmgr to print it verbosely. Here's one example:

     Boot003* Acpi(PNP0A03,0)/PCI(5|0)/Mac(00D0B7F9F510) \
        ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(0,5)MAC(00d0b7f9f510,0)

In this case, the ACPI HID is "0A0341d0" and the UID is "0". For the zx2000 gigE, the HID is "222F" and the UID is "500". For the rx2000 gigE, the HID is "0002" and the UID is "100". You create the boot entry with:
'efibootmgr -c -i eth0 -H 222F -U 500 -L netboot'

For kernels that support O_DIRECT (2.5.x), this should allow us to read the last sector of an odd-sized disk. If you can test this, please report success or failure.

Tarballs at:
http://domsch.com/linux/ia64/efibootmgr/efibootmgr-0.4.2-test1.tar.gz
http://domsch.com/linux/ia64/efibootmgr/efibootmgr-0.4.2-test1.tar.gz.asc

Feedback welcome!

Thanks,
Matt

Matt Domsch
Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer
Dell Linux Solutions www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com

It seems to work in brief tests on an rx2600 with Debian stable and 2.5.72.

Perhaps you could provide a bit more context in the introduction to help people new to the platform? Perhaps something like this:

cd ~/work/efibootmgr/efibootmgr-0.4.2-test1/src/man/man8/

diff -u -p /home/mbp/work/efibootmgr/efibootmgr-0.4.2-test1/src/man/man8/efibootmgr.8.docbook.orig /home/mbp/work/efibootmgr/efibootmgr-0.4.2-test1/src/man/man8/efibootmgr.8.docbook
@@ -92,11 +92,11 @@
     
     <note>
       <para>
-        &manpackage; requires that the kernel module efivars be loaded 
-        prior to use.  <command>'modprobe efivars'</command> should do the trick.
+        &manpackage; requires that the kernel support access to EFI
+        non-volatile variables (through <filename>/proc/efi/vars</filename>).
+        <command>'modprobe efivars'</command> should do the trick.
       </para>
     </note>
-
   </refsect1>
   <refsect1>
     <title>OPTIONS</title>

Diff finished at Fri Aug 1 11:53:10

Regards,

Martin 

Excellent, thanks.

You bet. You remind me that I need to update the docboog page now that I've updated the README. Dann's better at docbook than I though.

-Matt

Matt Domsch
Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer
Dell Linux Solutions www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com