Fedora on T420s with EFI

[visionviper]

When I try to install (using the DVD, 64 bit) it hangs when it boots to the installer. I've also had problems with Ubuntu, which also won't boot. What's the deal? Fedora is supposed to support EFI since 11. Am I just missing something?

[Volker]

When I try to install (using the DVD, 64 bit) it hangs when it boots to the installer. I've also had problems with Ubuntu, which also won't boot. What's the deal? Fedora is supposed to support EFI since 11. Am I just missing something?

There are bugs in essentially all EFI implementations to date, but this year's thinkpad violate the specs in some particularly horrible ways. Matthew Garrett has looked into booting Linux on EFI and there was some progress but as far as I know its still not 100% ok.

Its also worth to notice that the Thinkpad bios breaks all advanced trickery with GPT partitions. In theory you should be able to install a GPT-aware bootloader in the legacy MBR area and boot the thinkpad in legacy (non-EFI) mode. But that does not work.

[visionviper]

There are bugs in essentially all EFI implementations to date, but this year's thinkpad violate the specs in some particularly horrible ways. Matthew Garrett has looked into booting Linux on EFI and there was some progress but as far as I know its still not 100% ok.

Its also worth to notice that the Thinkpad bios breaks all advanced trickery with GPT partitions. In theory you should be able to install a GPT-aware bootloader in the legacy MBR area and boot the thinkpad in legacy (non-EFI) mode. But that does not work.

Fun! Why can't these things ever be simple

[chenxiaolong]

visionviper: You need to boot with the "noefi" kernel parameter on kernels before 3.0. It disables the kernel efi extensions. After you install Fedora, you can download kernel 3.0 from http://koji.fedoraproject.org which fixes all the EFI problems.

You can install Ubuntu using the same method too, but note that Ubuntu 11.04 WILL WIPE YOUR EFI PARTITION due to bug that won't be fixed until 11.10.

EDIT: Here ya go, packages for kernel 3.0: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buil ... dID=256100

[Volker]

kernel 3.0 from http://koji.fedoraproject.org which fixes all the EFI problems.

Can you reboot (without extra kernel command line parameters)? This was the last major outstanding issue a month ago.

[chenxiaolong]

Reboot works fine I'm pretty sure it doesn't reboot using the UEFI extensions though. I'm not sure how it reboots exactly, but it does work.