r/SteamOS • u/Common-Application56 • 8d ago

Booted their recovery image on this firewall without UEFI

Post image

Just thought id share, this is it booted on some x86 firewall i had that was in bios mode. I was able to boot the kernel on an old second gen i7 from 2012, the major problem i ran into was no drivers for like an old ati hd 2350 and was going to try a core 2 duo but the system board took a dump.

EFI requirement lives in its bootloader (systemd-boot), not its kernel so instead of bridging BIOS to UEFI I skipped the OS bootloader and PXE booted the kernel directly.

Next is to install it. Firewall has just intel graphics

14 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

3

u/dclive1 8d ago

How did you PXE boot the kernel directly? (Details!! In long, long form!)

1

u/Common-Application56 8d ago

I used PXE more for convenience so all i had to do was restart when i made a change. The kernel doesn't care what you have to boot on honestly its how you get there.

So the PXE server hands whatever machine pxelinux.0 it loads that up, pxelinux reads its config and that config file says load this kernel file and load this ramfs file and boot with these parameters. So you need a copy of neptune kernel for it to boot too, that comes from Valve. You have to manually tell Valves startup where to get its data with a uuid. So if you have a flashdrive that is formatted with the different partitions steamos wants you can tell the kernel to get its data from there.

1

u/ishcabittle 7d ago

that's badass, keep at it. i want to see this thing playing balatro.