Hello everyone,
First off, I'm aware the UEFI option in VMware workstation might not be supported. If you can't answer this, that's okay.
Alright, background. I'm a developer working for a backup software company and one of my primary assignments at present is UEFI boot support for all our rescue media. To cut a long story short, our application uses imapi2's API to write out an ISO image which we can then burn to disc; alternatively you can just use the ISO.
It turns out that if you attempt to set the product id using this API, weird things happen. Specifically, when creating the UEFI entry, you get:
Section Header Entry:
Header Indicator: 0x91 (Final Section Header Entry)
PlatformId: 0xef (EFI)
Section Entries: 1
ID: ""
Boot Catalog Section Entry:
Entry is bootable
Boot Media emulation type: 1.44MB Floppy Emulation
Media load address: 0 (0x0000)
System type: 0 (0x00)
Load Sectors: 2880 (0x0b40)
Load LBA: 352 (0x00000160)
(results of dumpet -i /path/to/iso).
The problem here is that the EFI entry is set to 1.44MB emulation. This is my (well, the API's) fault - and the UEFI spec says this must be set to "no emulation".
This dodgy iso does not boot when fed to real hardware, as the firmware there happily sulks at the spec violation and goes off to find a real EFI volume to boot. However, I've noticed workstation is a bit more tolerant; I can boot such a dodgy iso!
So my question is, does workstation simply ignore the emulation field? Or should it fail to boot? I am only really wondering whether this was intended behaviour, or if I've misinterpreted the spec - this isn't a crucial question.
Thanks,
Antony