Re: EFI GRUB configuration ignores platform, has issues

[Isaac van Bakel <ivb@vanbakel.io>]

Hi Marius,


On 04/22/2017 09:36 AM, Marius Bakke wrote:
> Hello Isaac!
>
> Isaac van Bakel <ivb@vanbakel.io> writes:
>
>> ...
>> The issue seems to be in part that grub-install for EFI tries to use
>> i386-pc for a platform, even when I pass --system=x86_64-linux to guix
>> system init, and the USB is a x86_64 one.
>> It tries to access a directory in /gnu/store
>> /<grub-efi>/lib/grub/i386-pc which doesn't exist, and promptly fails.
> Grub will try to guess the target platform automatically. Since the
> installation image is not yet UEFI enabled[0], your system has booted in
> BIOS mode, and grub tries to install the BIOS payload (which is called
> i386-pc even on 64-bit platforms).
Ah, that would explain my issues. It's interesting that it tries to use 
the BIOS payload with the grub-efi package, though.
>> If I copy over the x86_64 folder to i386-pc, the install gets past this
>> point, and I can go on to boot as (apparently) normal.
> Do you mean copy the "/gnu/store/<grub-efi>/lib/grub/x86_64-efi" folder
> to "/gnu/store/<grub-efi>/lib/grub/i386-pc"? The store is read-only for
> good reasons and you should never do this under normal circumstances.
Oh dear! Nothing a clean install won't fix, I hope.
>> However, I'm not sure whether to trust the boot totally, and I'm worried
>> about it being unreproducable without manual effort.
> I find it interesting that it worked at all. Does '/sys/firmware/efi'
> exist on the booted system? If that is the case, further invocations of
> `grub-install` (which is called when running `guix system reconfigure`)
> should detect the EFI platform and install the appropriate payload.
Sadly, it's missing. The /boot/EFI folder seems to be missing a lot of 
essential content as well, so I guess I'm using a BIOS bootloader.
> ...
> The safest approach to a native UEFI GuixSD system currently is booting
> another UEFI enabled Linux image, installing the Guix binary inside the
> live environment, and do `guix system init` from there. It's pretty
> involved, but we hope to have UEFI support in the official images Soon™.
Good to know. I was meaning to install another libre distro alongside 
GuixSD, just in case, but I might as well reorder the steps now to get 
it working first.
> Hope this helps, and sorry for the confusion!
It helps a lot, thanks!

Isaac
>
> [0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2017-04/msg00407.html