Bug#966575: grub-pc: error: symbol `grub_calloc' not found.

[Miklos Quartus]

Package: grub-common
Followup-For: Bug #966575

Dear Maintainer,

I am reporting this bug here as I would like to provide more comprehensive information about my system, as I use UEFI boot
(w/o secure boot option) in the hopes of quicker troubleshooting and finding earlier fix. I am not reporting it against 
grup-pc or grub2 as those packages are not installed on my system. Upgrading
grub-common / grub2-common to the latest version from pkg repository will break Debian Buster and fails to boot. The error
message I get after I try to boot is 'error: symbol `grub_calloc' not found.'

Before the recent GRUB security upgrade - which affected Debian Buster (stable) - my system had been working fine 
for a long period of time (cca. 1 year) and no issues whatsoever. 

# apt list --upgradable
grub-common/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.02+dfsg1-20]
grub-efi-amd64-bin/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.02+dfsg1-20]
grub-efi-amd64-signed/stable 1+2.02+dfsg1+20+deb10u2 amd64 [upgradable from: 1+2.02+dfsg1+20]
grub-efi-amd64/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.02+dfsg1-20]
grub2-common/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.02+dfsg1-20]

If I go ahead with the upgrade, it will be OK until next reboot, after that my system is rendered unbootable. 
Otherwise every other package is up-to-date in my Buster. My grub related packages are installed as shown below.

# dpkg -l 'grub*' | grep ^ii
ii  grub-common           2.02+dfsg1-20   amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader (common files)
ii  grub-efi-amd64        2.02+dfsg1-20   amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-AMD64 version)
ii  grub-efi-amd64-bin    2.02+dfsg1-20   amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-AMD64 modules)
ii  grub-efi-amd64-signed 1+2.02+dfsg1+20 amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (amd64 UEFI signed by Debian)
ii  grub2-common          2.02+dfsg1-20   amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader (common files for version 2)

See that I have _no_ grub-pc or grub2 installed:

# apt list grub-pc
Listing... Done
grub-pc/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64
grub-pc/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 i386
# apt list grub2
Listing... Done
grub2/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64
grub2/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 i386

but I do have grub-common:

# apt list -a grub-common
Listing... Done
grub-common/stable 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.02+dfsg1-20]
grub-common/stable,now 2.02+dfsg1-20 amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2]

Simply booting from USB Debian key and reinstalling GRUB onto my boot disk will not solve the issue. I had to manually downgrade
grub-common/grub2-common to the previous working version and reboot.

My EFI partition is at /dev/sda1, my root partition is at /dev/sda3. 

I hope this helps. 

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.4
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-9-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages grub-common depends on:
ii  gettext-base        0.19.8.1-9
ii  libc6               2.28-10
ii  libdevmapper1.02.1  2:1.02.155-3
ii  libefiboot1         37-2
ii  libefivar1          37-2
ii  libfreetype6        2.9.1-3+deb10u1
ii  libfuse2            2.9.9-1+deb10u1
ii  liblzma5            5.2.4-1

Versions of packages grub-common recommends:
ii  os-prober  1.77

Versions of packages grub-common suggests:
ii  console-setup  1.193~deb10u1
ii  desktop-base   10.0.2
pn  grub-emu       <none>
pn  multiboot-doc  <none>
pn  xorriso        <none>

-- no debconf information

Regards,
qmi