Linux, EFI, GRUB2, and the T420

[ThinkRob]

Tonight I got around to configuring my T420 to boot into Debian Wheezy via UEFI only. UEFI is the way forward, right? Well surely it must be, so it'll definitely be worth my while to get my laptop booting using this spiffy new technology...

And the end result?

It now boots -- brace yourselves -- a whole 1.2 seconds faster than booting via legacy mode.






What a waste of time.

Yes, the BIOS is "old" and "crufty" and UEFI is "modern". Fantastic. You know what the practical effect of this is for me?

Zip. Both of them work, but setting up UEFI boot wasn't exactly straightforward and has some fun quirks of its own (like being unable to boot into 1600x900 right off the bat -- so I *still* have to do a mode switch after the root partition comes on line...)

I'm considering trying out ELILO since I've always found LILO to far less insane than GRUB. Yeah, it's less flexible, but it also doesn't seem to be afflicted with the "inner platform effect"...

For now though, I'd recommend that people who're considering installing Debian on their T420 stick with the "legacy" boot mode.

[ThinkRob]

Well, that settles it. I'm using ELILO for all my EFI systems in the future.

Sure, the Lenovo UEFI implementation has what I think is a quirk that prevents it from seeing the vendor directories beneath /EFI, but that's easy enough to workaround. But the rest of it? Dead simple.

ELILO works. The config syntax is sane, the install was quick and painless, and I can actually figure out stuff just by looking at it (compare and contrast to /etc/grub.d ... <shudder>)

If anyone else is interested in getting ELILO boot working on the T420, let me know and I'll try to help.