On 14/05/2018 17:08, Skender Osmani wrote:
> All,
>
> Just wanted to get a feel as to how many of you have moved from using
> legacy BIOS to UEFI. Currently we are still configuring new PCs to
> use legacy BIOS and are working to get our backend infrastructure
> ready to support UEFI network booting. We have number of dual boot
> machines (Windows and Linux) and use syslinux/pxelinux to provide a
> boot menu for students to choose which OS to boot. Syslinux/pxelinux
> does not provide full support for UEFI network boot and we are
> looking at iPXE as an alternative to do the above.
>
> We have been testing new DELL machines with Intel 8th gen processors
> and have found that if you configure legacy BIOS on the machine, you
> can no longer boot to the local disk. We also got this confirmed by
> DELL. This feature/limitation will push us to accelerate the switch
> from legacy BIOS to UEFI.
This would be a bit of a headache for us.
We switched to UEFI for new staff installs back in 2016, and around that
time we attempted to switch to UEFI for our student PCs.
The staff side has been fine, but we ran into trouble on the student PCs
and ended up rolling everything back and sticking with Legacy boot.
The problem there was UEFI PXE - not so much in getting it to work at
all, but in getting it to work reliably and without side-effects.
E.g. cancelling out of a UEFI PXE boot by hitting Esc at the boot menu
could lead to windows booting with no network available until the PC was
restarted. We also had a much higher rate of issues with PCs failing
during the PXE boot process, and sitting on an error screen rather than
rebooting and going round again. (This is not great when re-imaging a
room overnight via wake-on-lan, as the machines are then stuck until
someone manually intervenes.)
Obviously, if UEFI-only hardware is on the horizon, we'll have to deal
with it again, but our general impression of UEFI PXE was that it still
needed work to be as useful as legacy PXE.
Mike
--
Mike Sandells
The University of Liverpool - Computing Services Department
Email: [log in to unmask] (*Preferred*) - Phone: 0151 794 4437
http://www.liverpool.ac.uk/csd
|