UEFI

UEFI

UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface". The UEFI specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications.

ROSA SUPPORT

ROSA started supporting UEFI beginning with ROSA 2012 Desktop Alpha2 iso images. Currently UEFI support is in testing stage and may be limited. Test results from real hardware and bug reports are required. Currently ROSA still builds 2 sets of iso images, with and without UEFI support. To check that your image have built in support - just look at iso contents. If you see EFI folder there - your image should boot on EFI hardware.

Preparing UEFI bootable flash drives

Currently there are different ways of preparing UEFI bootable flash drives:

1) Using the livecd-iso-to-disk from the livecd-tools rosa2012.1 package.

• - insert your flash drive
• - check it's device name ( with blkid command )
• - Run

  livecd-iso-to-disk --efi --format /pathtoisoimage/isoimagename.iso /dev/sdX

  (where X is the device letter that you got from blkid on previous step ).

Under testing:
2) Using the dd command CAREFUL! DD command may and will completely wipe your device. Please check your target device very carefully!

• - insert your flash drive
• - check it's device name ( with blkid command )
• - run

  dd if=/pathtoisoimage/imagename.iso /dev/sdX bs=8M

  (where X is the device letter that you got from blkid on previous step ).

3) Usually latest unetbootin in "iso" mode should also provide the bootable UEFI flash drive

TODO:
4) Manually formatting and partitioning of the flash drive

Bugs and feature requests

For any bug reports and feature requests please visit bugzilla