Simultaneous EFI and Legacy bootloader installation

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 09:26:11AM -0500, Mario Limonciello wrote:
> As Jared was mentioning to me the other day, there is unfortunately a
> mentality in the server world of not installing the OS in UEFI yet and
> leave the CSM enabled.  The best way to allow for that mentality to
> break is to allow an easy way for an admin to switch to UEFI mode
> without re-installation.

Or perhaps you could have a dialog box telling the user:

You booted in legacy mode.  It is recommended to boot in UEFI mode if
posible to gain some benefits:
- list of benefits

That seems like a lot less trouble.

> Yes, this will only help people wiling to reformat their disk.  I think
> if Debian can lead the way in switching to GPT by default it can be a
> role model for other distributions to make this change as well. 

Again, if you want to lead that, then tell people to switch their system
to UEFI before installing.  Don't do it by making a hack job install
that can cause lots of problems later.

> To me this is an acceptable compromise. 
> 
> IIRC there is a debconf question about installing to the removable path
> when you install EFI GRUB2.  What are the defaults for this? 
> Would you consider making the default yes if you identify they are
> running in legacy mode when you install the EFI GRUB2 (to do this
> bootloader switch).

That could be a useful feature.

A simple tool to change a disk from MBR to GPT without changing the
placement of partitions could also be handy.  That could REALLY help
people to move to GPT.  You would have to find a way to make room for
the ESP or BIOS Boot Partition though.

-- 
Len Sorensen