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

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Howdy!

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) skribis:

> Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> 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 qemu@1.3.1 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.

So it turns out that GRUB was properly installed in the EFI partition,
but the effect of the efivar failure above was that the computer would
not boot it automatically.

I found a “Boot from file” menu entry in HP’s BIOS, under “EFI boot”,
and from there I could select ‘grubx64.efi’ and boot GRUB.

There I typed at the GRUB command prompt:

  insmod efi_gop
  insmod efi_uga
  cat /var/guix/gcroots/grub.cfg

and typed the ‘search.file’, ‘linux’, and ‘initrd’ that appear
‘grub.cfg’ (“source /…/grub.cfg” did not work.)

That actually booted GuixSD.  This time it had /sys/firmware/efi.  Thus
I re-run ‘grub-install’ from there and upon reboot, the thing would
immediately boot GRUB!  \o/

I still need to sort out a few shenanigans but I’m getting there.

To be continued…

Ludo’.