Hi just a thought. Because so far we are still using bios boot.

 

Thank you

 

Thornwood

For what purpose though?  BIOS boots work with all devices.  UEFI boots only work with systems that support UEFI.  Just need to understand the reasoning behind this.  Do you have other systems that use a UEFI boot (non-VMs) and if so, what do you gain from using UEFI on those systems that a BIOS boot method can't deliver?

Well as I see it two reasons. First is to be able to implement secure boot in the future making sure the drive has not been tampered with. Second some people (mainly customers/friends) don't know the difference so they set up by mistake uefi to USB and hit there head for hours not understand why it doesn't work. I then need to explain reset to Bios to USB and they are running.... This can be very frustrating conversation over the phone. Usually goes something like did you set the system to boot to the USB.... Yes but it won't work.

 

Like I said just a thought

 

 

Thornwood

The other thing to take into account is that BIOS (and BIOS emulation) will deprecate at some point. Its better to be ahead of the curve than chasing behind it IMO.

BIOS being deprecated is probably a ways off yet. Thornwoods logic though is sound, but need to spend some time researching the requirements for this and how it would affect the make bootable script. Read that as, yes, something we should look into, but its probably a low priority item for us to implement.

So, big benefit of UEFI here- boot disk simplicity.

 

An EFI boot partition is just a plain old partition (partition 1, guid etc) with files you can actually manage. If you swap around OSs and stuff as much as I do, it's wonderful to be able to preserve your boot partition, as well as the EFI boots for your other OSs etc. And if you use a smart EFI bootloader like clover etc. it is amazingly good at finding other EFI booters on any disks, and you can actually call on EFI booters from not-fat partitions like ext, ntfs and the like.

 

I understand multi-booting and stuff like that defeats the purpose of unraid, but there's still lots of power in chaining EFI boots, plus just the simplicity.

 

On 9/24/2015 at 2:12 AM, jonp said:

BIOS being deprecated is probably a ways off yet. Thornwoods logic though is sound, but need to spend some time researching the requirements for this and how it would affect the make bootable script. Read that as, yes, something we should look into, but its probably a low priority item for us to implement.

 

Obviously this remains low priority but it would be nice to know it IS still on the list   Personally I could use it as part of a method that allows unlocking full turbo on Xeon CPUs.. but that cannot work unless unRAID is booting with UEFI....

On 15/09/2015 at 5:55 AM, jonp said:

For what purpose though?  BIOS boots work with all devices.  UEFI boots only work with systems that support UEFI.  

 

Well, no.  My X99-A refuses to boot off BIOS reliably.  It's the reason I had to stop using it.  Yes, I've reset BIOS, done all the sacrifices and dances, but still it only really boots off UEFI reliably.

+1 for UEFI boot

+1 here as well so we can make v3 Xeons boost on all cores max

UEFI boot would open up a lot of old Mac hardware that won't boot from a BIOS/MBR partitioned USB.  See my Mac Pro post in Hardware.

 

Unraid on older Mac Pros

 

+1 for this option.

Edited April 30, 20179 yr by ckoepf

I don't have a Mac so cannot try this but could SOMEONE try making a Clover USB boot stick (that is UEFI) and copy the unRAID files to it. Then config Clover to boot unRAID using Legacy mode? 

 

I believe this might get us UEFI booting and open up some interesting options for Xeon owners