Subject: [alpine-devel] efivar,efibootmgr: stabilization on all architectures

From: Lucas Ramage <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 10:54:38 -0500

Hello,

I would like to get these two packages into main but I need help testing
all of the different architectures.

I have x86_64, x86 covered as those are fairly standard these days and I
have plenty of hardware to test them on, but I do not have a way to test
any of the following:

- armhf
- aarch64
- ppc64le

Is there anyone here who uses these architectures that would be willing to
test these packages?

Thanks,

-- 

 <https://lramage94.github.io>

*Lucas Ramage* / Software Engineer
[email-masked] / (941) 404-6794

*PGP Fingerprint* / Learn More <https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/>
EAE7 45DF 818D 4948 DDA7 0F44 F52A 5A96 7B9B 6FB7
<https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xF52A5A967B9B6FB7>

*Visit online journal*
http://lramage94.github.io <https://lramage94.github.io>

  <https://github.com/lramage94>
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/lramage94>

---

From: "A. Wilcox" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:00:06 -0600

> have plenty of hardware to test them on, but I do not have a way to test

I only have ppc64 (not le), but I can tell you from experience that no
POWER or PowerPC system released by IBM, Freescale, Sony, Amiga, Apple,
etc use EFI.

Most use either OpenFirmware (incl. SLOF) or proprietary firmware.  The
newer IBM (and compatible) machines use OPAL.

Therefore, the packages should really be arch="x86 x86_64 aarch64" only.
 (Maybe armhf?  I'm unaware of any 32-bit ARM SoCs that use [U]EFI
besides the HTC One M8 Windows Edition, which can't be flashed with
Linux or Android.)

Best,
--arw

-- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org

---

From: Michael Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 11:36:54 +1100

Hi,

I have an aarch64 system that uses UEFI that I can test with. My experience with EFI on arm is that it’s even more fickle than on x86, so if possible it would be good to test on several platforms. This system is a gigabyte mt30-gs0 board with a cavium thunderx chip. I’ll test out alpine on it this weekend.

Regards,
Michael

> On 24 Jan 2018, at 11:00 am, A. Wilcox <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

---
Unsubscribe:  [email-masked]
Help:         [email-masked]
---

---

From: Carlo Landmeter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:10:16 +0100

> I have an aarch64 system that uses UEFI that I can test with. My experience with EFI on arm is that it’s even more fickle than on x86, so if possible it would be good to test on several platforms.…

Our aarch64 port is using the same board "mt30-gs0" booted with uefi
so i can confirm it works.

-carlo

---

---

From: Gennady Feldman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2018 12:53:43 -0500

I know it's been almost a year since this thread. Was trying to see if efi
setup was stable/working since last time I tried it. I tend to run Alpine
inside a VM. so I pulled the latest 3.8.1 Sep 11 Virt iso and tried to boot
inside VirtualBox with EFI enabled. I got the grub menu with "virt" kernel
option. After that it tried to boot the kernel and then nothing happened
after that. I think there was some effort to get the efi modules into the
virt kernel.

P.S. As a side note tried booting Alpine insider Hyper-V using "generation
1" (no EFI) and Linux "virt" kernel managed to enable hyperv_fb framebuufer
which was a pleasant surprise.

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 4:11 AM Carlo Landmeter <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> > I have an aarch64 system that uses UEFI that I can test with. My
> experience with EFI on arm is that it’s even more fickle than on x86, so if
> possible it would be good to test on several platforms. This system is a
> gigabyte mt30-gs0 board with a cavium thunderx chip. I’ll test out alpine
> on it this weekend.
>

---

From: Lucas Ramage <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 09:45:04 -0500

>> POWER or PowerPC system released by IBM, Freescale, Sony, Amiga, Apple,

I also was not aware of this, but apparently someone out there is using it
based on this commit from Github,

[testing/efivar: enable build on ppc64le](
https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/commit/845248e11ee87446dbee1c4b4b01e247d9512598#diff-6110a0e63db2f6ffdb1bca6ca8cb5349
)

As I said before, I only have x86/x86_64 hardware so that's all that I can
test. But I do not want to drop architectures if people need them.

> I have an aarch64 system that uses UEFI that I can test with.

Awesome, Michael. Thanks for your help!

-- 

*Visit online journal*