[Nix-dev] uefi booting on nixos

[Mathijs Kwik]

The new cd works fine!

Thanks for your work.


On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 6:17 PM, Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:
> With commit 33235 the livecd should be able to boot on most UEFI systems.
> Please let me know if it still fails on yours (make sure you get a cd built
> after that rev, of course).
>
>
> On 3/18/12 8:35 AM, Shea Levy wrote:
>>
>> Hi Mathijs,
>>
>> On 3/18/12 8:23 AM, Mathijs Kwik wrote:
>>>
>>> Little progress:
>>>
>>> I upgraded to kernel 3.3 and set this config:
>>>
>>>    boot.loader.efiBootStub = {
>>>      enable = true;
>>>      efiSysMountPoint = "/efi";
>>>      runEfibootmgr = true;
>>>      installStartupNsh = true;
>>>    };
>>>
>>> I had to disable grub, because it was now looking for a file named
>>> bzImagebzImage.
>>
>> Yeah, I had a fix for that in NixOS but my solution was awkward so I
>> reverted it, I'll have to put a better one in.
>>
>>> I ended up with some nixos stuff on my efi partition, and a
>>> startup.nsh script in the root.
>>> efibootmgr shouted a few "cannot connect to efi" lines. I did modprobe
>>> efivars first, but that didn't help. In bios mode, efi is just not
>>> available at all.
>>
>> Yeah, efibootmgr is not expected to work in bios mode. You'll need to
>> get into efi mode some other way then run
>> /run/current-system/bin/switch-to-configuration boot.
>>
>>> So I added /startup.nsh to my boot options in the uefi shell manually.
>>> Trying to boot it doesn't work though. The fallback (bios/grub) takes
>>> over immediately, no error messages or anything.
>>
>> .nsh files are EFI shell scripts. \startup.nsh is a special script that
>> is run automatically when the EFI shell starts if you don't press esc to
>> drop straight to the shell. If your system has a uefi shell (either
>> built-in, or one you have on your system partition that you launch with
>> 'launch shell from filesystem', depends on your firmware), you should be
>> able to just launch that and let it boot.
>>
>>> Are .nsh files part of the UEFI spec?
>>> I was successful before booting grub2_efi. It would not let me boot
>>> linux yet, but at least the menu and mode switching worked.
>>>
>>> Any other suggestions I can try?
>>
>> As I said above, if you can launch a UEFI shell it should automatically
>> pickup startup.nsh. If not, but you have another way to add a boot
>> option (e.g. through some firmware-specific menu), then you'll have to
>> add \kernel.efi launched with the arguments found in startup.sh as a
>> boot option. Otherwise, a fix for the CD on systems that don't support
>> the protocol I used is in the pipeline.
>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Mathijs
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Mathijs Kwik<mathijs at bluescreen303.nl>
>>>   wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Shea Levy<shea at shealevy.com>   writes:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi Mathijs,
>>>>>
>>>>> It's not totally complete. In particular, the
>>>>> installRemovableMediaImage option installs an EFI program that is a)
>>>>> really hacky and b) depends on protocols not available on every
>>>>> firmware (though when they're not available the boot fails with no bad
>>>>> effects). I'm working with the kernel devs to ameliorate the problem
>>>>> that necessitated the hack in the first place. I also need to do more
>>>>> extensive testing, especially on the macbook pro. That being said, I
>>>>> have been using it exclusively on my desktop for the past week or so
>>>>> with several successful rebuilds, so there's that. If you do want to
>>>>> try it out, I recommend trying the latest ISO from
>>>>> http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixos/trunk/iso_efi but if it doesn't boot
>>>>> in EFI mode boot it in BIOS mode for the install then, if your system
>>>>> supports efibootmgr, re-run switch-to-configuration after booting into
>>>>> the built system to install the boot manager entries.
>>>>
>>>> EFI mode doesn't boot. The CD does show up as an UEFI boot option, but
>>>> if I select it, I get a very fast blue flash (grub menu ?),
>>>> followed by my installed (harddisk) grub starting (in bios mode).
>>>>
>>>> Should I just try to switch my running system to UEFI using
>>>> boot.loader.efiBootStub?
>>>> I guess I can always just boot my current BIOS/grub entry when it fails.
>>>>
>>>> I don't fully see how efibootstub would work, how does it plug in to
>>>> grub2_efi? As far as I know (at least on my system) efibootmgr cannot
>>>> communicate with the uefi when booted in bios mode, so I'm pretty sure I
>>>> need a working boot cd, or supply the bootmgr entry in the UEFI shell
>>>> myself. (I had to do that for grub2_efi on Arch)
>>>>
>>>> Mathijs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Let me know if you have any problems.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Shea
>>>>>
>>>>> On 3/16/12 4:34 PM, Mathijs Kwik wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Hi Shea,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I saw your commits dealing with uefi booting.
>>>>>> On my laptop, windows 7 boots fine from uefi.
>>>>>> However, linux doesn't. Grub-uefi boots, but something goes wrong
>>>>>> (memory mapping) when handig control to the kernel.
>>>>>> In the past, I've spent countless hours debugging it to no avail.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I would like to give it another try someday soon.
>>>>>> Do you consider your uefi changes somewhat complete? Or do you still
>>>>>> have more changes planned?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Anyway, thanks for your work.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Mathijs
>>
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