Having an EFI shell binary on a USB stick can be incredibly useful when you're troubleshooting boot issues. I went down this rabbit hole because the Thinkpad X1

Having an EFI shell binary on a USB stick can be incredibly useful when you're troubleshooting boot issues. I went down this rabbit hole because the Thinkpad X1 Tablet doesn't play nice with GRUB when there's no keyboard attached, but if you setup entries directly in EFI you can select a boot partition using the touchscreen. There used to be precompiled binaries floating around in the tianocore Github repo, but it looks like the link has gone dead. See also Pete Batard's excellent project to support all kinds of exotic filesystems in EFI. http://efi.akeo.ie/ http://efi.akeo.ie/