Bug#708430: EFI Bug

[Alberaan ...y seré por siempre Alberaan]

The ultrabook is a T
oshiba Portege Z930-145 i5-3317U/4GB/128GB SSD/13.3"While inside of BIOS, I see:
System BIOS Version 6.40
EC Version 1.20

Any other details that I can help you with?

> Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 00:12:02 +0100
> From: steve at einval.com
> To: alberaan at hotmail.com; 708430 at bugs.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Bug#708430: EFI Bug
> 
> retitle 708430 need to also install grub to the removable media fallback path?
> thanks
> 
> On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 06:28:52PM +0000, Alberaan ...y seré por siempre Alberaan wrote:
> >Package: grub-efi-amd64
> >Version: 1.99-27+deb7u1
> 
> Hi Alberaan,
> 
> Thanks for reporting the bug as I requested. :-)
> 
> >We have been having trouble trying to boot to a debian system. Just
> >after a correct installation, debian didn't boot. The "Toshiba" logo
> >from my pc was stuck. Someone on #debian-boot told me he thought this
> >is what was happening:
> >
> >http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/4125.html
> 
> Yep, it seems this was the core of your problem. The suggestion to use
> Ubuntu's rescue-boot script only confused things further, hence why it
> took so long to diagnose the problem.
> 
> >Using debian installer in rescue mode, we did (sda1 being boot
> >partition, sda2 the / partition):
> >
> >mkdir /target
> >mount /dev/sda2 /target
> >mount /dev/sda1 /target/boot/efi
> >mount --bind /sys /target/sys
> >mount --bind /proc /target/proc
> >mount --bind /dev /target/dev
> >chroot /target
> >
> >cd /boot/efi/EFI
> >mkdir boot
> >cp debian/grubx64.efi boot/bootx64.efi
> >
> >We then rebooted and it worked.
> 
> Yes. grub-installer was correctly creating and installing the
> grubx64.efi executable in a valid path and attempting to instruct your
> laptop's firmware to boot it. BUT: it seems that the firmware is buggy
> and ignores EFI boot entries when they are created. By copying the
> grub executable to the fallback removable media path, your machine
> will now boot. This temporarily solves your problem with booting.
> 
> The problem with doing this is that at some point in the future when
> you upgrade to a newer version of the grub package, things will stop
> working. Newer versions of the grub-efi-amd64-bin package will replace
> the debian/grubx64.efi file and the modules that it loads, but *won't*
> replace the temporary copy we've made in boot/bootx64.efi. At some
> point, compiler changes or internal grub changes are likely to break
> compatibility between the old grub binary and new modules and at that
> point your bootloader will break again.
> 
> Fundamentally, the bug here is in the firmware of your Toshiba
> laptop. Alberaan, Could you please tell us more details of the laptop?
> Ideally we would like to have the model number and the firmware
> revision so that we can log that information somewhere for future
> users.
> 
> Secondly (and this is more to Colin): as we've now seen this failure
> mode in the wild in more than one case, I think that we need to add
> (optional?) code to grub-install to tell it to *also* install to the
> fallback removable media path. We could do a few things here:
> 
>  (a) use a blacklist of known-bad make/model/firmware versions and
>      automatically trigger the fallback installation when we detect
>      one
> 
>  (b) do the Windows thing: always install to the fallback path if
>      nobody else already has; we'd need to detect if the
>      previously-installed fallback file is from an older version of
>      grub-efi and if so upgrade it 
> 
>  (c) ask the user the question (and store their answer in /etc or
>      debconf or *somewhere*): "do you want to install to the fallback
>      path too?"
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> -- 
> Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
> "Because heaters aren't purple!" -- Catherine Pitt
> 
 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grub-devel/attachments/20130522/bc4c3894/attachment.html>