[MinnowBoard] 32-bit and 64-bit UEFI firmware for Minnowboard-MAX

Christopher Price cprice at mmv.mobi
Sun Nov 9 17:30:48 UTC 2014


Well, somewhat.

The main reason that UEFI32 and UEFI64 firmware exists is because when Bay Trail processors debuted, there were bugs in Windows 8.1 that caused Bay Trail SoC to bug out, particularly in the new “InstaGo” sleep states built by Microsoft that bypassed ACPI standards.

Those were later fixed in Windows 8.1 Update. However, since systems had to be built/planned long before 8.1 Update, they debuted with UEFI32. Most Bay Trail tablets today still ship with UEFI32 as a result.

GRUB2 has broken the 64-bit barrier with UEFI32. You often can also run 32-bit UEFI binaries from UEFI64 firmware too. However, you will be limited to 32-bit mode.

My team, for example, supports MinnowMax only with UEFI64 firmware on Console OS. I’m testing our RTM Developer Release 1 build on one this hour. However, we are still actively planning to support UEFI32 for other devices, hopefully by year’s end.

GRUB2 was the first Linux bootloader that successfully loaded up 64-bit operating systems using UEFI32 firmware. This functionality made its most major debut in Ubuntu 14.10 in tandem with improvements in Kernel 3.16 that facilitated this state changing. 

Christopher Price
ConsoleOS.com - iConsole.tv

> On Nov 8, 2014, at 7:26 AM, Peter Ogden <peter.j.ogden at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> UEFI can only work when the OS and Firmware are matched on what the architecture is. This means a 32-bit OS cannot be run from a 64-bit Firmware, and vice versa: 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.elinux.org/pipermail/elinux-minnowboard/attachments/20141109/6ab54c99/attachment.html>


More information about the elinux-MinnowBoard mailing list