Hello James and Cobbler folks.
This is an RFC for migrating to GRUB2 for UEFI/PXE netboot.
1. Background: Cobbler currently provides grub-{x86_64,x86).efi for netboot
for UEFI systems. This is based on the Red Hat-type-distros hacked
grub-legacy with UEFI net support.
By and large this works, but on my testing with Dell UEFI firmware it is a
bit hit-or-miss: it works with VNC installs but the console isn't always
initialized correctly. GRUB legacy isn't actively developed any more, so it
doesn't seem worthwhile to track down the root cause.
2. Proposal: to switch to GRUB2 for UEFI/PXE installs. GRUB2 is actively
developed, both upstream, and Fedora >= 19, and it has a config file search
algorithm similar to grub-legacy.
Fedora 19:
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-01-30-85-a9-46-ae-9e
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0A80196
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0A8019
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0A801
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0A80
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0A8
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0A
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C0
/grub2-efi/grub.cfg-C
BTW upstream GRUB2 does not do this, and will require kssendmac
functionality to work correctly
I have found GRUB2 to work reliably with the same variety of Dell UEFI
bioses.
3. If people think this it worthwhile, I could prepare a patch,
side-by-side with grub-legacy. It will not affect existing setups and
require manual intervention to activate to achieve further testing.
BTW, this, of course, doesn't affect the pos-install OS boot loader. Even
if Cobbler is using GRUB2, at the end of a RHEL6, CentOS6 install the OS
will still be using grub(-legacy).
-A.Alba
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