Using EFI firmware in Linux guest

[prontosystems]

HI Community,

I'm using Fusion 5.0.2 and I try to create a Linux guest (Debian 6) on a EFI based VM. I added the line firmware = "efi" in the vmx configuration file of the guest and got an EFI prompt while starting the VM but the system stopped on that EFI-prompt.

What I've to do to get this setup working?

Thx in advance & Bye Tom

[dariusd]

Hi Tom,

As far as I know, Debian 6 does not include any EFI bootloader, so it won't be bootable by our EFI implementation.  If you want to use Debian 6, you'll need to use BIOS.

Out of curiosity, what is your interest in running Debian 6 on EFI?  I'm one of the "virtual EFI" developers, so I am always eager to know more about what people are doing with it.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[dariusd]

Hi again Tom,

In case you're looking for some other Linux distro that will work with EFI, here's what we've tried and found to include usable EFI support::

• Fedora 11 (32 bit and 64 bit)
• Fedora 12 (32 bit) [the 64 bit release of F12 claims EFI support but has a catastrophic bug in its EFI bootloader]
• Fedora 13 & 14 (32 bit and 64 bit)
• Fedora 15 and newer (64 bit only)
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 and newer (64 bit only)
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP2 and newer (64 bit only)
• RHEL 6.x (64 bit only)
• Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.x (64 bit only)
• Ubuntu 10.10 and newer (64 bit only)

Derivatives/ancestors of the above distributions (i.e. CentOS, Linux Mint, Scientific Linux, etc.) might or might not have EFI support... YMMV.

Although Fusion doesn't officially support virtual EFI firmware for anything other than Mac OS guests, we'd love to hear your feedback nonetheless.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[prontosystems]

Good morning Dariusd,

we need a Linux VM for testing purposes, in this particular case for a trainees course work. We have partitioning a hard disk as subject, explain the MBR and EBR, working with BIOS and last but not least with an EFI based system. So there is no need to install Debian, we can use Ubuntu as well and for this scenario we need only a terminal and a few commands.

Thanks a lot for your attention and your interesting

Bye from the Bavarian snow hills 😉

Tom