Ubuntu
partman-auto package

recognising eeepc models and setting up a boot booster partition

Bug #370806 reported by KhaaL
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubiquity
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned
partman-auto (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Boot booster is a function implemented in the BIOS of all eeepcs that will make booting faster by caching data from the BIOS to a partition, thus not needing to go through the BIOS process at the next boot. This saves a few seconds during the boot process, at least from pressing the power button to going to the boot loader.

Currently ubuntu does not autodetect eeepc models during the installation nor is it possible to set up a EFI partition, which is required in order to have boot booster enabled. In order for boot booster to work, it needs at least one 8Mb partition (Its not confirmed if this matters but the partition should be on the first disk (sda)) of the type EFI (FAT-12/16/32) (hex code 0xEF).

The next reboot should skip the BIOS menu and go directly to the boot loader.

This is a goal thats relevant in order for ubuntu to become *the* leading netbook distro.

Tags: eeepc
KhaaL (khaal)
affects: ubuntu-express → ubiquity
Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Boot#BootBooster

Not straightforward though; libparted doesn't know how to create this kind of partition, which makes it a pain.

Changed in ubiquity:
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Yann (lostec) wrote :

Gparted/libparted allows creating the partition but does not allow creating a EFI partition ID... but fdisk can create EFI partition ID!

After creating a 8Mb unformatted partition, with gparted for convenience, at the end of /dev/sda... new partition will be /dev/sda2 if there is only one primary partition before creation:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda
"t", select appropriate partition nb (previously created partition, should be nb 2 in my exemple), and choose "ef" type...
After that, type "p" to check the partition table that will be modified. If correct, "w" to write it and escape fdisk with "q".

That's done, at next reboot "boot booster" appears again in eeePC BIOS.

It should not be a problem to automate this creation as all tools are already present in ubuntu liveCDs. I detailled instructions for users that are not very aware of this and could google here...

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