Originally Posted by rwebber

I have just successfully installed a slightly modified version of Slackware64 13.37 onto an EFI system (actually, on VirtualBox with EFI turned on). I had been following this thread while trying to figure this out, so I am posting here in case anyone else needs this information.

1) I got ELILO by downloading the source, which also contains the compiled .EFI program for X64. I didn't bother recompiling the source, but just used the already compiled program. (I figured that this needs to run BEFORE Slackware gets run, so it doesn't need to be a version that is compiled under Slackware.)

2) Using an existing non-EFI installation of Slackware 64-bit 13.37, I recompiled the HUGE kernel with the EFI Framebuffer support turned on. I made a copy of the Slackware 64-bit install DVD, with a new folder "efi/boot" with the elilo.efi program and a copy of the recompiled huge.s kernel image and the initrd and an elilo.conf to link it all together.

3) The above allowed me to boot the virtual system in EFI mode from the DVD and I got to the normal installation screen. I used gdisk (supplied on the installation DVD) to partition the new virtual hard drive with a 40 Meg partition 1 for EFI, 8 Gig for root linux, 2 Gig for swap. I manually formatted the EFI partition to FAT32, manually created a "efi/boot" folder on the EFI partition, manually copied over elilo, the recompiled huge.s kernel, and the elilo.conf (modified to set root to /dev/sda2).

4) After the manual work, I ran setup and did the normal install. I skipped the LILO installation, since I didn't need it.

5) When installation was done, I rebooted the virtual system and it came up properly in text mode.

The tricky parts of all this was recognizing that I didn't need to recompile the elilo.efi program, but that I did need to recompile the kernel to turn on the EFI Framebuffer support. For a while I was able to boot the system but couldn't see anything. If I typed commands blind, they would work just fine.

It seems that an EFI system does not have normal VGA, or text mode or VESA framebuffer support, but requires the new EFI frame buffer support. It's even worse on VirtualBox because its video mode is not supported by Linux until you load the guest additions from a virtual CD. I suppose that someone with a real EFI system with a real video card that is supported in the kernel might have an easier time of it, though your screen may be black until the kernel finished loading.

I hope this helps someone. It would be nice if the next version of Slackware has the EFI frame buffer turned on, and comes with elilo properly configured.