Installing Syslinux + UEFI

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" emerge -av =sys-boot/syslinux-6.02_pre16

Prepare BIOS

Depending on the machine and it's BIOS configuration options may need to be made.

Enable the UEFI, disable the Legacy (CSM) style things.

Prepare Partition

We are using GPT style partition tables.

We have created a NULL MBR (all-zeros in the Master Boot Record

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1 conv=notrunc

The first partition will be the EFI storage, make sure it's at least 512M (this is a FAT32 restriction). In the example below we've made the first one 1G. 

cfdisk /dev/sda
mkfs.msdos -F 32 -n 'Boot' /dev/sda1

sfdisk -l -u M /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 121601 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units: 1MiB = 1024*1024 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start   End    MiB    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *     0+   972-   973-    995998+  ef  EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sda2       972+  2925-  1954-   2000092+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3      2925+ 34177- 31252-  32001480   83  Linux
/dev/sda4     34177+ 953869- 919693- 941764981+  83  Linux

Install Bootloader

mount /dev/sda1 /boot
mkdir -p /boot/efi/syslinux
cp /usr/share/syslinux/efi64/{syslinux.efi,ldlinux.e64,libutil.c32,menu.c32} /boot/efi/syslinux/

Configure Bootloader

Edit the syslinux.cfg file, see documentation on the SYSLINUX Wiki.

PROMPT 1
# Measured in .10 of a second, 10 = 1s
TIMEOUT 50

UI menu.c32

MENU TITLE Edoceo Gentoo/Praxis
MENU CLEAR

# Only with VESAMENU
# MENU BACKGROUND edoceo-640x480.png
# MENU BACKGROUND fluorine.png

LABEL 6.6.35
	MENU LABEL Gentoo GNU/Linux 6.6.35
	KERNEL /vmlinuz-6.6.35-gentoo-dist
	INITRD /initramfs-6.6.35-gentoo-dist.img
	APPEND root=/dev/sda3 mitigations=off

Registering with EFI

Use the following command to register syslinux bootloader with the UEFI

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l \\efi\\syslinux\\syslinux.efi -L Gentoo

See Also