Hello,

While investigating reproducible ISO images for Guix¹, I found that
‘grub-mkrescue’ would invoke ’mformat’ without the ‘-N’ option.
Consequently, ‘mformat’ would pick a random serial number, thereby
making the ‘efi.img’ build process non-deterministic.

I came up with the gross hack attached: the ‘grub-mkrescue’ caller can
set the ‘GRUB_FAT_SERIAL_NUMBER’ environment variable, which
‘grub-mkrescue’ translates into a ‘-N’ flag for ‘mformat’.

We could perhaps achieve the same result differently, for instance by
adding an option to ‘grub-mkrescue’.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.

¹ https://issues.guix.info/issue/35283