Re: EFI and 32bit vs. 64bit

[Felix Zielcke <fzielcke@z-51.de>]

Am Donnerstag, den 04.06.2009, 01:23 +0200 schrieb Vladimir 'phcoder'
Serbinenko:
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 11:32 PM, Felix Zielcke <fzielcke@z-51.de> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > just talked with a guy from the debian-boot people about using grub-efi
> > for the Intel Mac Users.
> > Is there any way avaible in Linux to detect somehow if the EFI is 64bit
> > or 32bit?
> If you EFI-boot linux then its architecture is also the one of efi
> (afaik linux doesn't support efi64 with i386 kernel or otherway round)
> If it's not the only reasonable way is to use dmidecode's output
> (especially ProductName)

Hm but ProductName is for me the motherboard name.
So it looks like we'll have to maintain a list?
Bah why is EFI so stupid that it can be a different bit size then the
CPU uses.

> > Maybe some list of CPUs which could be grep'ed from /proc/cpuinfo or so?
> > I read on refit page that Apple introducted fat binaries, which would
> > work on both, but can they actually be created outside of MacOSX?
> fat binary is just a concateneting of 2 binaries with an extra header.
> So it's quite easy to create one

On refit homepage stands that they're Apple specific, so I don't think
it would be a good solution for longterm.
Seems like more and more adopt EFI now [0]

Otavio thought this would be grub's business not grub-installer's but I
start to think this just can't be properly solved in grub.
And as James said that efivars won't work if you boot the wrong kernel,
we even can't use that to detect EFI properly.

[0]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Platforms_that_use_UEFI_or_the_Framework
-- 
Felix Zielcke