EDK2 UEFI payload in RBoot

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EDK2 is Intel’s reference implementation of the UEFI boot specification. It is free software, released under a BSD-style license; many proprietary vendors fork it for their own products, but RBoot uses Intel’s BSD licensed code in a special fork that enables use as a coreboot payload. Full source code of this EDK2 version is provided by RBoot in RBoot 26.11 or newer.

RBoot provides an entirely free distribution of EDK2, designed specifically for use with RBoot.

With this, RBoot provides a full industry-standard UEFI implementation, capable of booting any UEFI-compliant operating system. Many GNU/Linux-libre distributions can be booted much more reliable, with standard bootloaders; for example, use of systemd-boot with UKI is possible. We recommend that you use a free operating system on your RBoot machine, such as Parabola - a full list of free system distributions can be found at https://www.gnu.org/distros/. Parabola is the most recommended distribution for RBoot development, as that is the libre distro upon which RBoot is most strongly build-tested and it has all of the dependencies in pacman.

This page also contains general guidance about EDK2 on all boards that use it, which is nearly all boards.

As shown in the photos, you can select a boot device; to change the automatic boot order, go to Boot Manager in the menu, and a menu will be present that lets you choose the order in which devices are booted. Press F10 to save any changes, and press Y to confirm when prompted.

An iPXE payload is also provided in the build.

WARNING: If migrating from another coreboot setup, most setups will likely use 512KB SMMSTORE, whereas RBoot uses 256KB SMMSTORE universally. This ensures that RBoot EDK2 with SMMSTORE can usually fit in the flash, with the smaller BIOS regions used in RBoot compared to some other coreboot distros. Please adapt accordingly. RBoot intentionally uses the default vendor flash layout on most boards, where an IFD is used, so that you can flash just the BIOS region and optionally (to disable the Intel ME) the IFD region to set the HAP bit. Please refer to the linked guide. Thus, please flash the entire BIOS region if migrating. After that, the notes below about fmap may be observed when upgrading from one RBoot version to another.

We use SMMSTORE by default. You can use this option in flashprog when updating the ROM (ONLY if your current flash layout is identical to the new one that you want to flash):

--fmap -i COREBOOT

Use these options in flashprog, to flash just the COREBOOT section. This avoids overwriting SMMSTORE which contains settings, otherwise you will restore your settings to default when updating.

Besides this, you can pretty much use EDK2 like you would any other UEFI firmware. Most users should pick it up easily when they boot with it.

Users familiar with proprietary/vendor UEFI firmware will probably be able to figure out RBoot’s EDK2 interface, as it is the same firmware. We use the version that is Free Software.

Nearly all Intel/AMD boards use the EDK2 payload exclusively, in RBoot. A few legacy boards use the SeaBIOS payload instead; those that have EDK2, only have EDK2, to avoid confusion.

The following boards have a full EDK2 UEFI payload available plus iPXE:

• dell_latitude_e4300_4mb
• dell_latitude_e5420_6mb
• dell_latitude_e5520_6mb
• dell_latitude_e5530_12mb
• dell_latitude_e6230_12mb
• dell_latitude_e6330_12mb
• dell_latitude_e6400_gpu_intel_4mb
• dell_latitude_e6430_12mb
• dell_latitude_e6530_12mb
• dell_latitude_e7240_12mb
• dell_optiplex_7010_sff_12mb
• dell_optiplex_780_mt_8mb
• dell_optiplex_780_mt_truncate_8mb
• dell_optiplex_780_usff_8mb
• dell_optiplex_780_usff_truncate_8mb
• dell_optiplex_9020_mt_12mb
• dell_optiplex_9020_sff_12mb
• dell_precision_t1650_12mb
• hp_elite_8300_cmt_16mb
• hp_elite_8300_usdt_16mb
• hp_pro_3500series_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_r400_16mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_r400_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_r400_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_r500_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t400_16mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t400_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t400_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t430_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t440p_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t500_16mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t500_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t500_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t530_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_w500_16mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_w500_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_w500_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_w530_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_w541_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x200_16mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x200_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x200_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x230_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x230t_12mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x301_16mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x301_4mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x301_8mb
• hp_elite_8200_sff_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t420_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t420s_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_t520_8mb
• lenovo_thinkpad_x220_8mb

In RBoot 26.11 and up, EDK2 UEFI is now the preferred payload, and it is recommended that users switch to use of this payload by default. This makes booting operating systems much easier as it complies with the very standards by which most distros are designed these days.

You can identify which image uses EDK2 because in RBoot 26.11 and up, the image filename will start with uefi_edk2. By comparison, the legacy setup will begin with bios_seabios_ which does not have EDK2; the txtmode bios_seabios_ setup may still be useful on some setups.

SPDX-License-Identifier: GFDL-1.3-or-later

Markdown file for this page: https://rboot.org/docs/install/edk2.md

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