About

This builds UEFI iPXE for the Raspberry Pi 4 ARM64 and releases it with the pftf/RPi4 binaries.

You can flash it to a an sd-card.

Then, you can try using iPXE.

This is used by rgl/talos-vagrant and is related to rgl/raspberrypi-uefi-edk2-vagrant.

sd-card flashing

Use Raspberry Pi Imager or Etcher to flash a release rpi4-uefi-ipxe.img.zip file into the sd-card.

Alternatively, use the rpi4-uefi-ipxe.zip file to manually create the sd-card.

Find which device was allocated for the sd-card that will store the UEFI firmware:

lsblk -o KNAME,SIZE,TRAN,FSTYPE,UUID,LABEL,MODEL,SERIAL
# lsblk should output all the plugged block devices, in my case, this is the device that I'm interested in:
#
#   sde    28,9G usb                                                                STORAGE DEVICE   000000078
#   sde1    256M        vfat   9F2D-0578                            boot
#   sde2    6,1G        ext4   efc2ea8b-042f-47f5-953e-577d8860de55 rootfs

Wipe the sd-card (in this example its at /dev/sde) and put a release in it:

# switch to root.
sudo -i

# set the sd-card target device and mount point.
target_device=/dev/sde
target=/mnt/rpi4-uefi

# umount any existing partition that you might have already mounted.
umount ${target_device}?

# format the sd-card at $target_device.
parted --script $target_device mklabel gpt
parted --script $target_device mkpart ESP fat32 4MiB 100MB
parted --script $target_device set 1 esp on
mkfs -t vfat -F 32 -n RPI4-UEFI ${target_device}1

# show the details.
parted --script $target_device unit MiB print
# Model: Generic STORAGE DEVICE (scsi)
# Disk /dev/sde: 15268MiB
# Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
# Partition Table: gpt
# Disk Flags:
#
# Number  Start    End      Size     File system  Name  Flags
#  1      4,00MiB  95,0MiB  91,0MiB  fat32        ESP   boot, esp
sfdisk -l $target_device
# Disk /dev/sde: 14,91 GiB, 16009658368 bytes, 31268864 sectors
# Disk model: STORAGE DEVICE
# Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
# Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
# I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
# Disklabel type: gpt
# Disk identifier: 1B1E7509-88AF-4F42-9106-4CD120FD37C9
#
# Device     Start    End Sectors Size Type
# /dev/sde1   8192 194559  186368  91M EFI System

# install the firmware in the sd-card.
mkdir -p $target
mount ${target_device}1 $target
unzip rpi4-uefi-ipxe.zip -d $target

# check the results.
find $target

# eject the sd-card.
umount $target
eject $target_device

# exit the root shell.
exit

Remove the sd-card from the computer.

Put it in the rpi and power it up.

iPXE Usage

When you see the UEFI firmware logo, press ESC to enter the Setup.

Select Boot Manager.

Select SD/MMC on Arasan SDHCI.

Press Ctrl+B to enter the iPXE command line.

Configure the network and the time:

dhcp
ntp pool.ntp.org

See the configuration:

config # press Ctrl+X to exit.

Try to download a file using HTTP and HTTPS:

# see https://ipxe.org/crypto
# see https://ipxe.org/cfg/crosscert
imgfetch http://boot.ipxe.org/1mb
imgfetch https://boot.ipxe.org/1mb
imgstat
imgfree 1mb # free one of the named fetched images.
imgfree     # free all.

Boot into the Debian Installer (https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst):

NB Also see https://github.com/rgl/raspberrypi-uefi-edk2-vagrant/blob/master/rpi.ipxe.

dhcp
ntp pool.ntp.org
set b https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-arm64/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/arm64
initrd ${b}/initrd.gz
kernel ${b}/linux
boot

Once Debian loads, press Ctrl+Alt+F2, type free -m to see the total memory. In my RPi4 with 8 GiB of RAM, this was the output:

BusyBox v1.35.0 (Debian 1:1.35.0-4+b3) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

# free -m
          total      used      free     shared  buff/cache  available
Mem:    7984044     82956   7758700     129312      142388    7620596
Swap:         0         0         0

You can also try to boot into https://netboot.xyz:

NB Here, although the netboot.xyz menu loaded correctly, it failed to boot an actual OS.

chain --autofree https://boot.netboot.xyz

For more information see:

• rgl/raspberrypi-uefi-edk2-vagrant.
• rgl/talos-vagrant.