EFI 'port' of PLD Rescue CD

This is a set of hacks which allow to create a PLD Rescue CD (or USB stick) bootable from EFI firmware (but with Secure Boot disabled).

The original RCD can be usually booted in the 'legacy' mode of a EFI-capable hardware, but then EFI interface is not available to kernel, which makes it hard to properly set up a system for EFI boot.

This project makes the RCD system EFI-bootable and adds two tools useful for EFI setup: gdisk (for GPT partitioning) and efibootmgr (for setting up EFI boot loaders)

Requirements

To build the image you need:

The original PLD Rescue CD These scripts were made for the Beta 2013-03-12 and probably won't work with anything else. Only the 64-bit versions are supported.
Root shell on a x86_64 PLD system with the following packages installed:a
- make
- kernel-rescuecd >= 3.10.17-1
- libicu
- gdisk
- efibootmgr
- cpio
- efi-shell-x64
- elilo
- dosfstools
- syslinux
- cdrkit-mkisofs (or other compatible 'mkisofs')

Building

To build the Rescue image:

Check out this code
Make the 'orig' directory and mount the original PLD Rescue CD there or copy its contents there
Issue 'make'

If everything goes well, then you will get two image files: efiboot.img and hybrid.iso

Usage

hybrid.iso can be burn on a CD-R using cdrecord and can be booted on legacy BIOS and EFI systems

efiboot.img can be written do a USB stick (cat efiboot.img > /dev/sdX) and will be bootable from EFI systems only.

Secure boot is not currently supported, so it needs to be disabled in the BIOS before the system can be booted.

When booted in EFI mode it will enter EFI Shell. Enter the boot option ('aa' usually) in the shell and PLD will boot.

TODO

There is still to be improved:

better bootloader/chooser. EFI shell is great because of the flexibility, but it looks bad and currently requires interaction. ELILO won't allow booting shell, GRUB2 is too complex… rEFInd maybe?
Secure Boot support. Basic shim with custom key should do
Integrate this upstream
EFI-only ISO image

How this works

a custom.cpi archive is created with the extra EFI tools
a disk image with a FAT partition is created, as EFI can only boot from FAT
the EFI shell is installed as the boot loaded on that FAT file system
there are EFI shell scripts to find and start the Linux kernel there. The kernel contains EFI stub, so it is loaded as an EFI 'application'
the custom.cpi archive is appended to the original RCD initrd image, as the kernel EFI stub can load only a single initrd file

Jajcus / pld-rescue-efi