Re: [PLUG] FYI: It is possible* to boot UEFI executables from NTFS

Well, the original post was a simple chainloader, it loads NTFS support and then executes any standard-location UEFI binaries it finds there. Clever, simple, and useful once in a great while. I may use it some day.

WRT Rich's second idea: Not sure exactly what you're asking. Coreboot is a firmware that inits hardware, you can set it up to hand over to Tianocore (Intel's reference software UEFI implementation) for a FOSS boot+UEFI solution. Tiano doesn't have the capability to init anything besides very basic hardware, that's why you would need Coreboot to handle that and hand over to Tiano.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 5:49 PM, Mike DePaulo <mikedep333@gmail.com> wrote:

I do not mean to disrespect, but it sounds like you are confused by
the components/stages of the boot process.

If you want a straightforward open source only UEFI boot process, it
would look like:
1. coreboot (hardware initialization portion of the firmware)
2. Tianocore (UEFI portion of the firmware)
3. GRUB2 (bootloader)
4. linux+initramfs

If you were in the BIOS world, you would substitute SeaBIOS for #2,
and then use the BIOS build of GRUB2 for #3

Between steps 2 and 3, you can have a chainloader (or at least that's
what it's called in BIOS terminology.) And that chainloader could also
serve as bootloader in its own right. If you are looking for something
like this where #2 is UEFI (Tianocore or a proprietary competitor),
look at reFInd. It was discussed in Rich's presentation. It acts as
both a chainloader (for every possible bootloader) and as a bootloader
(for Linux specifically.) It has autodetection:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

-Mike

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 8:51 AM, Mike DePaulo <mikedep333@gmail.com> wrote:
>> *Using a UEFI NTFS driver, which is located on a small FAT32 partition.
>> https://github.com/pbatard/uefi-ntfs
>>
>
> Sounds like a secondary bootloader. Obviously those are unlimited in
> their capabilities. Does anybody know if anybody has created anything
> like "coreboot for UEFI" or similar? I'm thinking about a
> linux+initramfs that is just designed to provide a super-flexible
> bootloader for another OS. Maybe that is what the more popular UEFI
> bootloaders already do.
>
> --
> Rich
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