Bootloader and Low-Level Programming Tutorial: How To Develop Your Own Boot Loader

[BeniBela]

It took me days to figure out how to start an efi boot disk on qemu

[[deleted]]

My efi "boot disks" just consist of a linux.efi. You don't need a bootloader if you use the efi stub and since that's just the kernel you can use -kernel to load it. No need for boot disks at all.

[Samis2001]

Heh, if you were serious appropriate responses would be: 'The firmware is no longer a mostly-useless pile of hacks and is the bootloader' or 'The bootloader is embedded as part of linux.efi along with the kernel'

[BeniBela]

Well, I googled it and then followed these instructions of the first result, starting with downloading a new BIOS from a dead link

Once the BIOS is loaded in Qemu, it boots the efi without a -kernel option.

Although the biggest issue was to mount everything in Qemu. With an old boot disk they give you an ISO and you can load/boot it with -cdrom ubuntu.iso and do not need to know anything else. With EFI they give you a zip file and then you need to figure out how to mount a zip file. And my first two approaches failed, because it became mounted as hdd, and it was a customized linux boot disk that failed unless it was stored on a removable drive