I use rEFInd as my EFI Boot Manager. This post is about taking some extreme measures to achieve best possible boot experience across all my machines - both servers, PCs and laptops. Why bother about boot? For me it is important to have the following features available:

  1. Some pre-boot environment that might be useful, if I brick my main OS.
  2. Ability to boot alternative syste.

EFI partition

I decided to always reserve 1 GB for EFI partition. Please note those recommendations:

  • sss
  • yyy

I keep on my EFI partition also firmware files and

I always mount my EFI partition as /efi using the following entry in /etc/fstab:

# /dev/sda1 UUID=C043-FAA5
LABEL=EFI               /efi            vfat            rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro   0 2

Tools

This section discusses tools, I have on my EFI partition.

Memtest86+

Why I need it? Just to test memory after adding / removing / changing / upgrading memory modules. Memtest is actually pretty good software to check that computer is properly operating. Installation - memtest EFI binary should end up in /EFI/tools directory on EF partition:

pacman -S memtest86+-efi
cp /boot/memtest86+/memtest.efi /efi/EFI/tools/memtest86.efi

Note that the destination file MUST be named exactly as memtest86.efi, otherwise rEFInd will not find it.

GPT fdisk

EFI version of gdisk can be downloaded from SourceForge.

Installation - extract gdisk_x64.efi and copy it to EFI partition:

unzip gdisk-efi-1.0.4.zip
cp gdisk-efi/gdisk_x64.efi /efi/EFI/tools/

rEFInd will automatically recognize presence of fdisk.

GRUB2

TBD… (I want to load ISO files, and GRUB allows for this)

EFI Shell

For advanced troubleshooting / admin tasks.

PXE

To boot various OSes from my OpenWrt NAS.

References