Pete Batard's Resource for UEFI Shells

Sometimes you'd like to do some work in the UEFI Shell, but you don't have one installed on a USB flash drive that's handy.

Or, you're switching between machines of different Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) types, and the shell you have isn't built for the current machine.

Or, you wouldn't mind building the shell for an ISA different from what you have, but you don't have the build tools available to do it.

Or, you have a shell, but it was built several years ago, and it would be best if you used a shell built from the latest edk2 stable tag.

For all these reasons, it is fantastic that Mr. Pete Batard keeps a GitHub repository of pre-built shells from which you can download what you need.  For each new edk2 stable tag release, Pete will:

1. build the UEFI Shell
2. build it for every ISA
3. make it available as both a raw .efi file as well as part of an .ISO image file that is ready for imaging to your flash drive of choice

You may be wondering:  what about security?  Couldn't this be a convenient way for someone to build UEFI shells with rootkits and distribute them?  Pete thought of that too, so he provides a meticulous 8-step process for you to verify the contents of his pre-built shells.  I won't copy & paste that here, but you can read about it on GitHub under Binary Validation.

I tested the latest shell, "24H2", on both AArch64 and X64-based systems.  I downloaded the "Release" .ISO and imaged it to a USB flash drive using Rufus (another of Pete's projects!).  I can confirm everything worked as designed, and the shell booted on both architectures without modification to the USB flash drive.

Also, Pete maintains a blog you may find interesting:  https://pete.akeo.ie/

Thanks Pete!