Bug#792547: grub2: add option to _not_ install to UEFI boot order

Ian Campbell ijc at debian.org
Thu Jul 16 07:27:03 UTC 2015


Source: grub2
Version: 2.02~beta2-26
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

In #789798 against grub-installer I said:

    I have a need to repeatedly install Debian from PXE on systems which are
    UEFI only (arm64 as it happens but I think all of the below applies to x86
    UEFI too). When we want to actually boot the installed OS we chainload from
    the PXE grub.efi to the one on the ESP (using
    grub-installer/force-efi-extra-removable for simplicity, but that's by the
    by, I think).

    This is for automated testing which does a fresh install before most tests.

    The problem is that during install Debian inserts itself into the UEFI boot
    order _before_ the PXE entry, this happens via grub-installer.udeb ->
    grub-install (from the main grub deb) -> efibootmgr -c.

    This means that when we come to want to regroove the box it won't boot from
    PXE.

    grub-install offers an option to avoid this (--no-nvram) which is passed by
    grub-installer under some very specific circumstances (known broken
    hardware) but it would be very useful if this was a pre-seedable option so
    it could be used in circumstances such as the above as well.

The solution to this turns out to require patching the grub2 packages as well,
to avoid it installing to NVRAM either during initial package installation or
upgrade. This is achieved by having grub-installer propagate a debconf setting
which is added by this patch. The text of the question was reviewed by
debian-l10n-english in the context of #789798.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386, armhf, armel, arm64

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: grub2.patch
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 3892 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grub-devel/attachments/20150716/5651ea88/attachment.patch>


More information about the Pkg-grub-devel mailing list