Re: [PATCH 6/6] gnu: Add grub-efi.

[Marius Bakke]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> Marius Bakke <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Hello!
>>>
>>> Marius Bakke <address@hidden> skribis:
>>>
>>>>>> OK. I'll try to find out why tests don't work with the UEFI variant
>>>>>> first in order to at least write a meaningful comment. Maybe qemu needs
>>>>>> UEFI support or something like that.
>>>>>
>>>>> It might be that we no longer need QEMU 1.3.1 to run the tests (see the
>>>>> top of gnu/packages/grub.scm)?
>>>>
>>>> The problem is missing UEFI firmware for the qemu calls. But we indeed
>>>> no longer need address@hidden for the tests, at least on x86_64. I replaced
>>>> it with 'qemu-minimal'. Pushed!
>>>
>>> Great!
>>>
>>> I’m failing at installing GuixSD on a new laptop I have here.
>>> ‘efibootmgr’ exits with code 2 and this message:
>>>
>>>   EFI variables are not supported on this system.
>>>
>>> (which ‘grub-install’ happily ignores.)
>>>
>>> This is because /sys/firmware/efi is missing, which apparently is
>>> because I booted off the GuixSD USB image (“legacy”) and not in EFI
>>> mode.
>>>
>>> What would you suggest?  :-)
>>
>> What I did was a normal BIOS install, backup the grub.cfg, switch laptop
>> to UEFI (only) and boot a Debian live CD. From there "apt-get install
>> grub-efi; grub-install /dev/sda" and afterwards copy grub.cfg in place.
>>
>> You may want to add "insmod efi_gop" and "insmod efi_uga" to grub.cfg,
>> otherwise you won't get a framebuffer until the proper video driver is
>> loaded (which may require unlocking root partition etc).
>
> Wait, all I need is /sys/firmware/efi in the install image.  Is it
> impossible?

Perhaps you can trick Linux into creating it without booting UEFI mode.
Not sure if grub/efibootmgr actually need to read or write there.

>> Not the most user friendly installation instructions! I'm researching
>> methods to make the base install image hybrid BIOS/UEFI.
>
> What would it take?

The scripts I've looked at so far seems to use ISOLINUX as the initial
bootloader and then chainload to grub. Didn't experiment much, haven't
been able to get syslinux packaged yet.

It's *probably* possible do it with grub only, by partitioning the
installation image and create both a "bios_grub" GPT partition and an
EFI system partition and install to both with a different --target.

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