Related: General NERF Install Procedure?

[Matt B]

Hello,

A couple of years ago I saw Ron's talk on NERF. An acquaintance who
maintains a fleet of machines expressed some interest in NERF. He wants to
boot linux instead of windows, which isn't supported by his (extremely
recent) build of UEFI. (no legacy support whatsoever)

The closest thing I could find to instructions for using it or otherwise
replicating what's been done is the explanation for the Dell R630 here: [1]
Many sections are still TODO and it overall seems fairly half-baked (with
things like USB and networking not working).

I surmise the basic steps are:
-Dump the BIOS flash
-Extract key boot blobs from flash
-Configure and build NERF
-Flash resulting image

Has any progress been made (public) since 2017? Does a generalized install
process exist (like that provided by me_cleaner, for example) or is this
something that requires a large amount of rework for each platform?

I imagine it is totally impossible to produce anything that would be
accepted by stock UEFI as an update for internal flashing.

Sincerely,
    -Matthew Bradley

[1] https://trmm.net/NERF

[David Hendricks]

Hi Matt,
There actually has been quite a lot of progress made here, though
admittedly the state of documentation is somewhat confusing...

Here are some more resources to check out:
The LinuxBoot book has more up-to-date examples:
https://github.com/linuxboot/book/blob/master/7b.UEFI_Tool_Kit/README.md
Fiano is a set of tools for manipulating UEFI firmware:
https://github.com/linuxboot/fiano
Go Forth and Modify with Fiano (2019 OCP Summit):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrylZsqyi0c
Slack channel (join the linuxboot channel): http://slack.u-root.com/
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/linuxboot

The naming has also gotten a bit confusing over the years. As I understand
it, NERF is more of a general concept of reduced UEFI. Fiano is a toolset
and LinuxBoot just implies replacing BDS and portions of DXE with Linux and
an initramfs to load and execute the target OS kernel.

HTH!

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM Matt B  wrote:
> Hello,
>
> A couple of years ago I saw Ron's talk on NERF. An acquaintance who
> maintains a fleet of machines expressed some interest in NERF. He wants to
> boot linux instead of windows, which isn't supported by his (extremely
> recent) build of UEFI. (no legacy support whatsoever)
>
> The closest thing I could find to instructions for using it or otherwise
> replicating what's been done is the explanation for the Dell R630 here: [1]
> Many sections are still TODO and it overall seems fairly half-baked (with
> things like USB and networking not working).
>
> I surmise the basic steps are:
> -Dump the BIOS flash
> -Extract key boot blobs from flash
> -Configure and build NERF
> -Flash resulting image
>
> Has any progress been made (public) since 2017? Does a generalized install
> process exist (like that provided by me_cleaner, for example) or is this
> something that requires a large amount of rework for each platform?
>
> I imagine it is totally impossible to produce anything that would be
> accepted by stock UEFI as an update for internal flashing.
>
> Sincerely,
>     -Matthew Bradley
>
> [1] https://trmm.net/NERF
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