Systemd-boot

The package is a simple UEFI boot manager, capable of booting Linux and Windows in EFI mode.

Installation
The installation of gummiboot consists out of the following steps:


 * 1) Installing the gummiboot package.
 * 2) Preparing the EFI System Partition.
 * 3) Installing the gummiboot UEFI boot manager.

Package installation
For the moment, is still in ~arch so needs to be added to the  first:

Next, install the package:

EFI system partition
Make sure that an EFI System Partition is available on the system. This is a GPT partition on the disk that is marked as EF00 (EFI System partition).

For instance, with :

The file system on this partition must be FAT32:

Mount this location on the system ( works just fine) and create the location.

gummiboot UEFI boot manager
The gummiboot application makes the installation, which only needs to be performed once (unless a new version of gummiboot needs to be installed), fairly simple. However,
 * make sure that the system is booted with EFI to start with (either from a EFI compatible media, or through the Linux kernel with EFI stub support) as it will otherwise fail to install, and
 * make sure that the EFI variable file system (efivars) is mounted:

Then perform the install itself:

The installation will install the proper EFI files so that the EFI-capable system will boot the gummiboot bootloader.

Configuration
For each operating system, a boot loader entry file needs to be created.

Next to the boot loader entries, a small default configuration file can be created as well.

Default configuration entries
In a file called  can be created which contains at most the following two entries:
 * A default entry, specifying which operating system entry to boot as default
 * A timeout entry, specifying the number of seconds to wait before the default boot entry is loaded

For instance, this would look like so:

The name of the default entry is the name of the configuration entry file, as created in the next section, without the suffix.

Operating system configuration entries
These entry files need to be located on the EFI system partition, in the location. So if the EFI system partition is mounted at then this is at. The following is an example configuration entry named "gentoo":

The linux entry points to an EFI stub Linux kernel file, installed on the EFI system partition.

Using gummiboot
Although the EFI stub kernel configuration works fine, it has the downside that
 * new Linux kernels are somewhat risky to test out, as only a single kernel is booted
 * adding boot options requires rebuilding the Linux kernel

With gummiboot, additional entries can be configured for new Linux kernel tests, and additional boot options are easy to add to the configuration entry file, or even at boot time.

One-time boot loader options
In order to boot the system with a particular boot option, in the gummiboot screen, press to edit the options.

The changes made in the gummiboot screen are not preserved!

External resources

 * Gummiboot Is Dead