Simultaneous EFI and Legacy bootloader installation

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 04:11:29PM -0500, Mario Limonciello wrote:
> I think this is a great first step out of this thread.  The challenge I
> see with this is how you identify a machine that happens to be running a
> BIOS that actually supports running in a UEFI mode.

I was wondering if that was possible too.

> If the system supports SMBIOS 2.3 or later, then the BIOS
> characteristics extension byte 2 bit 3 should indicate that UEFI is
> supported.

That's good to have.

I do see 'UEFI is supported' under Characteristics on one of my machines
in dmidecode, even though it is running legacy mode.

> Where in the installer would this dialog land?  Somewhere early on in
> d-i I'd think after you picked your language but before you've gotten to
> partitioning.

Probably.

> I'm assuming simple is a relative term.  You would have to be able to
> resize a filesystem in order to make another partition for the ESP. 
> Then you also could run into a situation of a system that wouldn't like
> an ESP that it finds later in the disk.  I don't know how common this
> problem is.

I don't think I have ever tried anything other than at the start.
You are supposed to just go by the UUID to find it, but firmware makers
sure are good at doing the wrong thing that just happens to work 99.9%
of the time.

-- 
Len Sorensen