[Discuss] UEFI

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:37 AM, Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> wrote:
>
> I haven't built my own computer in so long I haven't kept up on stuff
> like this.
>
> Has anyone tried to take an existing linux system (non-UEFI) and move it
> over to new hardware (specifically, UEFI-enabled)?

I've done it on a non-UEFI system.  It wasn't that hard to get basic
boot/network working.   All I had to do was make sure that the
disk/network driver for the new hardware was either compiled into the
kernel or loaded by the boot-time RAM disk.    Then I took the old
disk and plugged it into the new system.   At that point, fixing
sound/high-end graphics was no different then what I had done in the
past to upgrade graphics/sound on an already existing system.  I find
it easier to do this then to recreate literally years of system
customizations to a fresh install.   Yes, if the system was under
configuration management this wouldn't be necessary. On the other hand
the cost of using configuration management for a single isolated
system didn't seem worth it when I did the first install and I'm still
not sure it would have been. The "system" in question started as a
Dell running Ubuntu 7.10 and is now running 12.04 on hardware I built
from parts.   Even the hard disk is different (courtesy of a disk
image copy).

Unfortunately, I don't have UEFI experience and doing this with secure
boot will certainly add to the task.   My vague memory is that the
Linux kernel has not been modified to lock down all system files when
booted via secure UEFI boot so it sounds like it should still be
possible to avoid have to recreate your software install from scratch.
 Some quick googling seems to show that you might have to learn about
GPT disk paritioning to do it though.  If you try, please report back
here.

Bill Bogstad