UEFI Install Guide

   Note

This material has been integrated into the main Funtoo Linux Installation guide, so please look at that guide if you are installing Funtoo Linux. Editors: this page still contains some good content that we might want to move over there.

This tutorial will show you how to install Funtoo on a UEFI system. UEFI, also known as the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, is a new firmware interface that is used on some newer computers as a replacement for the traditional PC BIOS. It has an integrated boot loader, so setting up booting is different.

This tutorial is meant to be an "overlay" over the Regular Funtoo Installation. Follow the normal installation and only follow steps in this tutorial when dealing with partitioning and configuring the boot loader (GRUB). All steps are otherwise identical to the regular installation process.

What Are We Doing?

This guide will show you how to set up your UEFI system to load the GRUB boot loader, which will then load your Funtoo Linux kernel and initramfs. This is the "UEFI + GRUB" method as described on the Boot Methods page.

First Steps

To install Funtoo Linux on a UEFI system, first you need to boot SysRescueCD in UEFI mode. To do this, enable UEFI in your BIOS, and if necessary disable legacy booting. After some fiddling, you should be able to boot SysRescueCD and get a black and white text menu instead of the traditional aqua/cyan-colored menu. The black and white menu indicates that you booted SysRescueCD in UEFI mode. Once you've accomplished this, you're ready to continue with your Funtoo Linux installation and partition your drive. See below for details.

   Note

If the /sys/firmware/efi directory exists, then you have successfully booted in EFI mode and will be able to configure your Funtoo system to boot in EFI mode. If the directory doesn't exist, fix this first. It is a requirement for setting up EFI booting.

Partitioning

To set up your partitions for UEFI booting, you will create a ~500MB FAT32 partition on /dev/sda1, and set it to type EF00 using gdisk.

Command: n ↵
Partition Number: 1 ↵
First sector: ↵
Last sector: +500M ↵
Hex Code: EF00

This partition will serve as your Funtoo /boot filesystem as well as the partition that the UEFI firmware can read to load GRUB. Then you will set up swap on /dev/sda2 and your root filesystem on /dev/sda3. To create the FAT32 filesystem, type:

root # mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sda1

Your /etc/fstab entry for this filesystem will also differ, and will look like this:

/dev/sda1		/boot		vfat		noatime	1 2

Kernel

VFAT

Make sure you add VFAT support to your kernel if you are building it manually.

EFI Framebuffer

If you have the following option enabled in your kernel, then uvesafb and efifb will not be able to detect the framebuffer:

Under Bus options (PCI etc.):

[*] Mark VGA/VBE/EFI FB as generic system framebuffer (NEW)

If you have that option enabled, you must also enable:

Under Device Drivers-->Graphics support-->Frame buffer Devices:

[*]   Simple framebuffer support

This is the preferred method of using the EFI framebuffer, the efifb and uvesafb drivers will be used as a fallback if the above is not compatible.

Known Issues

• With pure UEFI boot mode, with legacy mode disabled, following error expected:
  • video driver not supported, boot hangs, hard reboot required.
• Choose UEFI first, next legacy driver. It depends on motherboard vendor and efi bios version.
  • In UEFI bios choose grub option, if your succeeded with above guide, additional menu should appear in Boot Menu, otherwise it boots into EFI shell: grub:NAME of you hard drive
• On some systems, installing the packages that are required for UEFI booting with any gcc later than a 4.x.x release may lead to a black screen after the GRUB screen. To fix this, before you begin installing any packages on your system, emerge =gcc-4.6.4-r2 and proceed with the installation as usual. Remember to switch your compiler back to the version of gcc that came with your system after you have finished installing. To do this, use gcc-config 2.

Done!

Remember to follow all other steps in the regular Funtoo Install Guide. Assuming you did everything correctly, your system should now boot via UEFI! We will be adding UEFI support to boot-update soon to make this process easier.