Bug#756253: Upgrade from 2.02~beta2-10 to 2.02~beta2-11 left grub unbootable

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 05:22:52PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 04:16:56PM +0900, Mike Hommey wrote:
> >On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:28:51PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> >> Hi Mike,
> >> 
> >> Have you seen this again recently? Is it still happening for you?
> >
> >As a matter of fact, it hasn't happened recently. That being said, I'm
> >not upgrading grub that often, but I happen to have upgraded it today,
> >and a reboot worked. It's too late now to know what the efi boot table
> >looked like before, but during the package install, efibootmgr
> >complained like this:
> >
> >Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
> >efibootmgr: Could not set variable Boot0001: No such file or directory
> >efibootmgr: Could not prepare boot variable: No such file or directory
> 
> Oh, that's much more interesting. That suggests your actual problem is
> below grub - either efibootmgr or your firmware.

Note that I don't think this was being printed when I filed the bug. As
a matter of fact, message #20 says I had a Boot0001 back then, and I had
2 Windows boot manager entries, so the gap probably comes from me fixing
that afterwards.

> Adding a CC to the
> efibootmgr package maintainer too. What versions do you have for
> libefivar0 and efibootmgr? If you run

ii  efibootmgr                  0.11.0-3           amd64
ii  libefivar0:amd64            0.15-3             amd64

Now, since the history of the bug says that I filed it in july and had
it still occur on oct 24, here is another possibly interesting bit of
data:

# zgrep -h upgrade\ libefivar0 dpkg.log* | sort
2014-07-01 14:31:17 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.10-2 0.10-4
2014-07-15 18:03:11 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.10-4 0.10-5
2014-10-04 09:26:11 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.10-5 0.12-1
2014-10-18 10:44:58 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.12-1 0.14-1
2014-11-03 11:26:54 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.14-1 0.15-1
2014-12-16 08:55:38 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.15-1 0.15-2
2014-12-23 19:23:29 upgrade libefivar0:amd64 0.15-2 0.15-3
# zgrep -h upgrade\ efibootmgr dpkg.log* | sort
2014-05-07 17:19:09 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.5.4-7 0.6.1-3
2014-06-20 21:20:34 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.6.1-3 0.7.0-1
2014-07-15 18:04:01 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.7.0-1 0.7.0-2
2014-10-04 09:27:00 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.7.0-2 0.9.0-1
2014-10-18 10:57:25 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.9.0-1 0.9.0-2
2014-11-03 11:27:20 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.9.0-2 0.11.0-1
2014-12-16 08:58:39 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.11.0-1 0.11.0-1.1
2014-12-23 19:23:49 upgrade efibootmgr:amd64 0.11.0-1.1 0.11.0-3
# zgrep -h upgrade\ grub-efi-amd64 dpkg.log* | sort
2014-04-09 12:11:00 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.00-22 2.02~beta2-8
2014-04-09 12:11:00 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.00-22 2.02~beta2-8
2014-06-20 21:20:52 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-8 2.02~beta2-10
2014-06-20 21:20:53 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-8 2.02~beta2-10
2014-07-28 08:39:14 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-10 2.02~beta2-11
2014-07-28 08:39:15 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-10 2.02~beta2-11
2014-09-24 06:10:56 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-11 2.02~beta2-13
2014-09-24 06:10:57 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-11 2.02~beta2-13
2014-10-04 09:28:07 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-13 2.02~beta2-14
2014-10-04 09:28:08 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-13 2.02~beta2-14
2014-10-18 10:58:07 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-14 2.02~beta2-15
2014-10-18 10:58:07 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-14 2.02~beta2-15
2014-12-16 08:59:19 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-15 2.02~beta2-18
2014-12-16 08:59:20 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-15 2.02~beta2-18
2014-12-23 19:23:52 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-18 2.02~beta2-19
2014-12-23 19:23:53 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-18 2.02~beta2-19
2015-01-17 11:38:15 upgrade grub-efi-amd64:amd64 2.02~beta2-19 2.02~beta2-20
2015-01-17 11:38:16 upgrade grub-efi-amd64-bin:amd64 2.02~beta2-19 2.02~beta2-20

>   # strace -f -o strace grub-install

I don't think this would be relevant to the original bug, but here you
are, attached.

There is a ENOSPC in response to creating a new variable. So in fact, it
may well be not fixed, but "seems" to be fixed because efibootmgr fails
to do anything and doesn't break the boot configuration as a result.

Mike