For work, I’m dealing with an embedded board with quirky UEFI, where it’s temperamental to load various EFI Linux systems, and with Legacy BIOS boot it also reveals issues with Debian frame buffer driver (corrupt video during install, so cannot navigate the menus), and unable to properly boot several Debian based distros. Arch installs OK, but that takes a full day to sort out the Linux services/privileges tango. I gave Haiku a shot, and it booted like a champ. EFI boot will work if I kickstart from USB and select the hard disk for boot, but due to the UEFI bug on embedded board, it doesn’t immediately scan the hard disks. EFI shell and manual specifying file system FS0: and cd to Haiku EFI image works. Legacy BIOS boot works fine for Haiku.
Also, I’ve been installing various Linux distros to USB stick, and trying to mount these. Eventually a ESP (EFI System Partition) got onto the USB stick, then the modern OS’s (Win11/OSX Big Sur) tried to prevent overwriting the USB ESP, and due to automount, BalenaEtcher couldn’t write the image properly. Haiku to the rescue again, since it has no problem removing the USB ESP partition, and dd-ing the image to USB disk works without any dramas.
So my only success on this embedded device was Haiku and Arch. Guess which one was up and running faster.
