Re: [coreboot] The OS of open source solution

[Stojsavljevic, Zoran]

Patrick,

As we speak, people in the lab are downloading for me Win7 32bit and Win 8.1 32bit, making bootable sticks. I would like to ask you the following question?
You wrote: "do fresh Windows installs from BIOS (UEFI+CSM is enough), then use these for your coreboot experiments"... Do I need to change some CMOS option (UEFI Compatibility Support Module) in EFI BIOS installed on my another IVB CRB and adapt prior installing win7 and 8.1 32bit?

Please, advise?

Thank you,
Zoran
_______
Most of The Time you should be "intel inside" to be capable to think "out of the box".

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Patrick Georgi
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 9:51 AM
To: Stojsavljevic, Zoran; [e-mail]
Cc: ron minnich; David Hendricks ([e-mail]); coreboot
Subject: Re: [coreboot] The OS of open source solution

Am 17.10.2013 09:38, schrieb Stojsavljevic, Zoran:
> For Windows 7, it has two boot modes: legacy 32-bit boot mode, and 
> UEFI 64-bit boot mode.  The former/legacy boot mode boots from any 
> legacy BIOS (SeaBIOS, AMI, Intel, etc.), and the latter one requires 
> few UEFI run-time services.
> They say that Windows 8 only boots from UEFI, but it might be possible 
> to boot with SeaBIOS using 32-bit Windows is becoming possible.  
> Run-time services will not disappear during or after boot, but all 
> other boot firmware will.

Both 32bit and 64bit Windows, both 7 and 8, are supposed to be bootable with PC BIOS. It's just that logo requirements mandate UEFI for Windows 8, but that says nothing about its capability to boot with SeaBIOS.

When booting with UEFI, 64bit is required, since they only interface with the 64bit version of the UEFI APIs.

However you can't boot a BIOS-installed Windows with UEFI and vice-versa. So if you installed an UEFI Windows, SeaBIOS won't be able to run it.

Solution: Do fresh Windows installs from BIOS (UEFI+CSM is enough), then use these for your coreboot experiments.

If you're creating new installations, consider obtaining "checked" 
Windows builds (available through MSDN channels). Those are much more useful for debugging, in particular when it comes to ACPI issues (with one caveat, see http://www.coreboot.org/ACPI#Using_checked_builds).

Patrick