CPU/RAM/MB upgrade question.
 

Currently running:

Want to upgrade to a Kaby Lake i5 on a Asrock Z170 MB and DDR4 3000 RAM.

LILO is sitting in the MBR and of course no UEFI. There is nothing at all under /boot apart from the normal boot files and an empty grub subdirectory. In the past none of my CPU/MB upgrades meant switching from BIOS to UEFI, I could just plug the old drives into the New MB in the same order and the system would boot up.

I'm not entirely sure how UEFI works so I was wondering will 4.4.75 huge kernel automatically find the kaby lake chip and understand the motherboard given it's working on a different principle? I'm guessing not, because LILO won't know what to do either to even get to that stage. Is there a way to get all the UEFI stuff under /boot before actually having an UEFI system, or do I select a 'legacy' mode or something in the new motherboards BIOS?

Basically I'm after precautions to take so the finger crossing can be kept to a minimum and not end up with a nonbootable system.

Kaby Lake support comes in 4.9.x, so you might need to switch to -current or compile your own kernel

Oops, I think I misunderstood your post with my former post. I don't think you'll have any problems. I think it'll be a while before PC OSes totally cut off BIOS and only boot from UEFI.

Oh wait...I guess my original post is still relevant... you are looking into buying a UEFI machine, right?

I have a Mac with EFI, not the later UEFI, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

But, yes, even on the Mac (which never had BIOS before), there is a BIOS emulator in firmware written in EFI. So Macs can now boot any OS that expects BIOS, including Windows. I run Solaris on my older Mac Pro and Solaris is supposed to be EFI compatible (or UEFI I guess), but it doesn't seem to boot in EFI on my Mac so I have to boot it in BIOS. But once the OS loads and takes over, there's really no difference.

I'm not that really interested in learning it, so I don't have a boot loader installed that does this, but you can go to an EFI shell and actually write a program in EFI. This is usually used for drivers so the devices are available and working at boot time so you can boot from them, etc. It is compiled into a cross-platform byte code (kind of like Java is) so that it is not machine dependent.

All in all, EFI/UEFI is a great leap forwards from BIOS. However, on the Mac, we used to have OpenBoot with the PowerPC Macs and that was just as good if not better I think.

So anyway, I wouldn't be afraid of getting a UEFI machine, I'm sure it will be able to emulate BIOS if/when you need it to.

Thanks, I'll build a 4.9.x just incase. It's been several years since I've bothered - hopefully nothing much has changed from http://www.slackbook.org/html/system...on-kernel.html

Cheers, it better be heh - I got the Motherboard and RAM middle of last year, just never got around to getting the CPU - the good ol Core 2 quad is a resilient bugger.. it just won't die. Alas the upgrades gotta be done eventually so might as well get it out the way.

UEFI is nothing to worry about. Slackware version 14.2 installer's handle it.

What are you going to get? A Core i7? That's what I have in my MacBook Pro. My Mac Pro has two Xeon processors but they are quite old. The laptop is just as fast if not faster.

Yep. I know the installer handles it, but the precautions I want to take are for a system with Slackware already installed that I spent a full week getting setup exactly how I wanted it. I'm only replacing the CPU/MB/RAM and keeping all the rest (ie my 3 SSD's and other accessories) and want to make sure it boots straight up.

Edit to add: oops - I see you wrote 'installers' not 'installer'. So something in init will realise it's UEFI? if so that's great, then all I need to do is compile a 4.9 kernel. Anyway I was more worried about LILO shitting itself not knowing where to look since everyone is using ELILO for UEFI.

i5 7600k- i7 is overkill for me. There was also a period where people were advised to turn off hyperthreading due to some stuff up (not sure if that was sky lake only or sky lake and kaby lake) but I'm staying away anyway - i5 still has 4 true cores like the i7 but without hyperthreading :)

No you're not - there are a bunch of other chips on a motherboard - that all need to be supported. Ask me how I know - and I was tracking Linus' tree at the time.

Personally I always build a new system to ensure everything is included - and for a BIOS/EFI change I'd make sure it was also gpt. Save your data (which is what really matters), and start from scratch.
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Fair call. I guess I've just always been lucky in the past then - everything always worked off the bat using older drives using the existing OS with a newer motherboard, though they were of course all BIOS motherboards.

I'll take your advice on board, but I'm still determined to give it a crack first to see what happens heh. Needless to say I've got a separate /home so my data isn't the problem it's the week I've spent getting this system exactly how I want it - took ages to get all the little things like multilib, steam, skype, upgrades, setting up my firewall rules, setting up hosts bla bla bla.

You know the worst thing, a few months back my (current) primary drive was using gpt because I wanted to see how FreeBSD was coming along since around 2010. I changed everything back though.

Oh and my motherboard is now a year old, and all the chipsets were supported even then - so I'm not concerned about compatibility on that front.

You have two options, which you detailed in your first post. Enable legacy mode which would allow you to continue using your current setup without any changes, or switch to UEFI.

To enable UEFI, at a minimum, you'll need to repartition your drive to provide a FAT32 formatted EFI partition. However, beyond this, I haven't ventured, so the rest is just a guess and I'd wait to see if others have other suggestions. elilo is preinstalled on a 14.2 install, so once you have the EFI partition set up, you should be able to run the setup script for elilo, however, you'll need to be in the root filesystem, and you will have needed to boot the installer in EFI mode.

You might also be able to run eliloconfig and have it place the files where they're needed automatically.

Overall, I'd say stick with running "legacy" at least until you decide to reinstall Slackware (maybe when the next stable comes out).

As for the Kaby Lake support, rather than compiling your own kernel, you could just install the one from -current. Or, if you do want to compile it yourself, you could use the config from -current.

My current setup is an ASUS M5A99FX mobo, with UEFI options, but I was able to enable legacy mode, and it's been happily booting Slackware via LILO for some time now. My guess is that motherboard manufacturers will not go UEFI-only for some time, because backward-compatibility of the legacy OSs is still important at this point in time.

Having said that, if you still want to consider wiping your OS drive and start again from scratch, I'm not discouraging you from that. However, you said that you've spent a week customizing your system just the way you like it; speaking for myself only, if I'd spent that amount of time tweaking settings, I would not be keen on blowing all that away. So I'd spend some time in the motherboard manual to find out how to enable the legacy mode, so that you'll be able to continue computing the way you've been doing it for some time.

Just my :twocents:

Happy Slacking!!

I've never had any problems, even with multiprocessor programs I've written myself. I can get next to 800% processor utilization out of it.