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UEFI refusing NVRAM writes, breaking GRUB install and upgrade
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vinceh121
Sep 16, 2022, 2:50:05 PM9/16/22
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Hi all,
Southern French government is handing out laptops (HP ProBook x360 G1
EE) to students, whom a lot of want to install a Linux distro on.
However, many distros installs are broken by grub-install either safely
failing, or making the kernel hang while trying to write NVRAM boot
options. I've confirmed this on Debian Buster and Bullseye.
This causes the netinst images to give us a mostly working installation,
except for a config-less GRUB. For now, we've gone around this by
manually booting with the GRUB CLI, and then running grub-install with
the --no-nvram option.
However, the problem reappears when running apt upgrade.
Is there a way to mitigate this problem? Maybe a way to tell
grub-install to always use --no-nvram?
Thanks,
- vinceh121
Southern French government is handing out laptops (HP ProBook x360 G1
EE) to students, whom a lot of want to install a Linux distro on.
However, many distros installs are broken by grub-install either safely
failing, or making the kernel hang while trying to write NVRAM boot
options. I've confirmed this on Debian Buster and Bullseye.
This causes the netinst images to give us a mostly working installation,
except for a config-less GRUB. For now, we've gone around this by
manually booting with the GRUB CLI, and then running grub-install with
the --no-nvram option.
However, the problem reappears when running apt upgrade.
Is there a way to mitigate this problem? Maybe a way to tell
grub-install to always use --no-nvram?
Thanks,
- vinceh121
Steve McIntyre
Sep 16, 2022, 6:10:05 PM9/16/22
to
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com
"We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could
ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs." -- Mike Andrews
Steve McIntyre
Sep 18, 2022, 7:50:06 AM9/18/22
to
On Sat, Sep 17, 2022 at 03:07:29AM +0200, vinceh121 wrote:
>Thanks, this works!
>
>Is there a way to set this option during installation on a netinst image?
Yes! You can switch to expert mode for installation and then
>Thanks, this works!
>
>Is there a way to set this option during installation on a netinst image?
grub-efi-$ARCH will ask you these questions. Or you can add these
options using a preseed, tweaking the following settings to change
from the default answers.
### Description: Force extra installation to the EFI removable media path?
# Some EFI-based systems are buggy and do not handle new bootloaders correctly.
# If you force an extra installation of GRUB to the EFI removable media path,
# this should ensure that this system will boot Debian correctly despite such a
# problem. However, it may remove the ability to boot any other operating
# systems that also depend on this path. If so, you will need to make sure that
# GRUB is configured successfully to be able to boot any other OS installations
# correctly.
# d-i grub2/force_efi_extra_removable boolean false
### Description: Update NVRAM variables to automatically boot into Debian?
# GRUB can configure your platform's NVRAM variables so that it boots into
# Debian automatically when powered on. However, you may prefer to disable
# this behavior and avoid changes to your boot configuration. For example,
# if your NVRAM variables have been set up such that your system contacts a
# PXE server on every boot, this would preserve that behavior.
# d-i grub2/update_nvram boolean true
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ability to read or write anything that is longer than one hundred and sixty
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