UEFI ISO boot with ebiso

October 27, 2015

By Gratien D'haese (gratien)

UEFI ISO boot with ebiso

UEFI ISO booting is possible with the standard available mkisofs or genisoimage executable on Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat derivates.

However, on SuSe SLES or OpenSuSe systems the above mentioned iso creator cannot produce an ISO image which is able to boot on UEFI based systems. The history goes way back to March 2013 - see the discussion of Rear issue #214 for some back ground.

Finally, there is some good news! The project ebiso from Vladimir Gozora wrote the missing piece especially for UEFI SLES systems in combination with Relax-and-Recover. The usage of ebiso is extremely simple (I like the kiss principle):

# ebiso -R -o /tmp/bootable.iso -e boot/centos.img /tmp/bootdirfiles

Well, to integrate ebiso with Relax-and-Recover you need to define in your /etc/rear/local.conf or /etc/rear/site.conf configuration file the following:

ISO_MKISOFS_BIN=/usr/bin/ebiso

Be aware, that ebiso awareness into rear was introduced after the rear-1.17.2 release, therefore, use the development version of rear in case of SLES 11 SP3 or use git clone git@github.com:rear/rear.git to download the latest source tree of rear.

Thanks to ebiso and rear SAP HANA systems running on top of SuSe SLES 11 (or SLES 12) can be recovered - finally! No more legacy boot method needed - Yeah…

We hope you might find ebiso useful!

Update: These days ebiso is not required anymore on SuSe SLES systems (2024).

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