Re: GRUB EFI installation breakage

[Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com>]

On Wed 23 Aug 2017 00:25, ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> skribis:
>
>> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> To reconfigure my system on UEFI, I had to apply this patch:
>>>
>>> modified   gnu/bootloader/grub.scm
>>> @@ -401,7 +401,8 @@ submenu \"GNU system, old configurations...\" {~%")
>>>          ;; root partition.
>>>          (setenv "GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK" "y")
>>>          (unless (zero? (system* grub-install "--boot-directory" install-dir
>>> -                                "--efi-directory" efi-dir))
>>> +                                ;; "--efi-directory" efi-dir
>>> +                                ))
>>>            (error "failed to install GRUB (EFI)")))))
>>>  
>>>
>>> Before that ‘grub-install’ would fail because ‘efi-dir’ would actually
>>> be “/dev/sda”, which is what I have in the ‘device’ field of
>>> ‘grub-configuration’.
>>>
>>> Removing the “--efi-directory” solves the problem because ‘grub-install’
>>> automatically determines that the EFI directory is mounted at /boot/efi.
>>>
>>> I think 2941b347b664a3d3114de0ac95e28db78db66144 is bogus because it
>>> assumes that the second argument of the gexp’d lambda is ‘efi-dir’,
>>> where in fact it is the ‘device’ field of the bootloader config.
>>>
>>> So what is the preferred fix?  Simply remove “--efi-directory” like I
>>> did above, and rename ‘efi-dir’ to ‘device’ to avoid the ambiguity?
>>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Maybe we could rename "device" to something like "target" and update the
>> documentation to mention that "target" means the _mounted_ EFI System
>> Partition for grub-efi, but is typically a block device.
>
> You mean it’s a block device except for EFI, right?
> So yes, we can rename ‘device’ to ‘target’, and we should at least
> document what you wrote.

Hi!  Sorry for causing problems.  For EFI, we shouldn't specify a block
device AFAIU -- if anything, we should specify the location of the EFI
directory (though it defaults to /boot/efi).  My intention was to change
the meaning of "device" for EFI to be the mounted EFI directory.  But
really I think we should recommend getting rid of this configuration
option, at least in our EFI examples, as a default mount path of
/boot/efi will be good enough I think.

I can update the doc and examples -- will do that now.

Andy