Carry out your test of Gales with the same QEMU + Debian Wheezy environment with same CPU provisioning that you finally settled on.

The current plan is to use the same method as Cuntoo, adjusting where needed. Hard to say at the moment whether this will take one day or ten, but I'm eager to try it out regardless.

How does an article outlining the basics and introducing the uefi 1-2 disctinction sound for an initial delivierable ? What'd be your timeline on that ?

Unfortunately I'm currently behind on that front (was hoping to have a first report last Friday) due to poor time estimates. From my notes as they currently stand, there doesn't seem to be an explicit UEFI 1/2 comparison in the specs, which means that I might have to approach the whole thing from another angle -- the separation is there, it might be just that legacy support meanwhile became optional or something. From my reading of the documentation so far, it's all vague enough, which explains my past experiences with motherboards which booted CDs/DVDs in legacy mode, but USB devices only in UEFI mode -- it all depends on what drivers the BIOS implements in each mode and I'm guessing it's the vendor's choice when it comes to that.

Anyway, my current plan is to lay out some principles and systematically sort all this out, then use it as a starting point for e.g. enumerating motherboards/BIOS software/whatever works to delimit TMSR-supported hardware from all the rest.

The "at least an hour of time daily" estimate for the apartment search was way under the real value. This took more like three hours on average, with some days going well over four hours. But at least it's given me something to write about.

At least as far as I'm concerned. I'd personally very much like to take a look at this, in the way I looked at Trinque's bootstrapper. The two could then be compared along the lines that bothered me the most, at the very least.

I very much liked your cuntoo bootstrapper notes and will schedule time before this month to carry out your method.

Carry out your test of Gales with the same QEMU + Debian Wheezy environment with same CPU provisioning that you finally settled on.

End of the year timeline is good for now, let's see how things look once uefi-1/2 mapping is further.

Thanks for the update on holiday, I hope they're enjoyably productive on many fronts.

I'll begin by studying the UEFI specs: given that the latest version of the standard weighs almost 2600 pdf pages, the short-term plan is to get an overview of the basics and then focus on the UEFI 1-2 distinction.

Sounds like a good short-term plan. How does an article outlining the basics and introducing the uefi 1-2 disctinction sound for an initial delivierable ? What'd be your timeline on that ?

It's hard to say at the moment how much this will take me, maybe a week or two, but by now I fancy myself wise enough to stop and report my findings before throwing myself into rabbit holes.

Sounds good, brief updates as you go and things clarify would be good.

Glad you're recovering from the illness, Cheers.