[Mageia-discuss] UEFI

Doug Laidlaw laidlaws at hotkey.net.au
Mon Apr 23 14:33:24 CEST 2012


On Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:00:02 +0200
mageia-discuss-request at mageia.org wrote:

> According to wikipedia, linux has been able to boot EFI since the
> year 2000. Mageia (and Mandriva before) supports GPT (the partition
> tables used on UEFI disks) on MBR disks, since I've been using that
> for well over a year. More info at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI
> 
> Grub supports GPT since version 1.97 patched for GPT (which 
> Mageia/Mandriva used), and on versions 2.x and up.
> Lilo may not work with EFI, but there is Elilo. 
> http://elilo.sourceforge.net/
> (The last release in 2007)
> The 2,2TB limit is for MBR disks.  EFI and Linux support much higher
> limits.
> 
> Initially there were some problems with diskdrake, but I think that
> they have been solved.  (The workaround for formatting partitions on
> disks with GPT partition tables was using gparted.)
> 
> Regards
> 
One minor distro I tried recently uses GPT by default, but it seems to
have its own limitations, e.g. won't run on a USB key.  From what I
read, MS were going to have a bootloader that locked everything else
out.

I decided to look at Macintosh a few days ago, and found that it won't
run on an AMD processor.  Then there was Windows Service Pack 3 which
caused problems except for Intels.  My supplier said to ignore SP3
anyway.  There seem to be a lot of schemes to lock you into hardware,
and they aren't all Windows.

Doug. 


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