Bug#966554: how to apply the workaround?

[Steve McIntyre]

On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 09:26:47PM +1200, quixote wrote:
>Thanks very much for your answers. There's something bizarre going on. Yes, my
>/sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ said it was full and had dump-* files in it. I
>removed those a few days ago. But after your comment I went to look if there
>were new ones cluttering the place up. No, there weren't, but
>
>
>df -h /sys/firmware/efi/efivars returned:
>
>Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>
>efivarfs           0     0     0    - /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
>
>
>Why would it think it was full? Especially after I'd removed about fifty dump
>files, which have not reappeared.

You *may* need to reboot to let the firmware clean up underneath; the
management of EFI variable space by firmware can often be fairly
terrible. :-(

I'd recommend you have an installation/live image on USB first, just
in case you need to boot in rescue mode to get back in to your system.

>Yes, I have a /boot/efi partition. I did get the size wrong: it's 512 MB , of
>which 7.97MB is used. The root partition is 30GB.)
>
>I tried
>
>apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi
>
>which eventually returned:
>
>Unpacking grub-efi (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2) over (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2) ...
>
>Setting up grub-efi (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2) ...
>
>As far as I can tell, that's the correct, new version. I also reinstalled
>grub-common and grub2-common, also seemed to be up to date.

Yup, that's the correct version.

>But, given the "no space available" in efivars dir, I'm not too surprised that
>an attempt to
>
>grub-install /dev/nvme0n1
>
>just says no space left on device.

Right.

>I've seen instructions on manually removing obsolete entries in the efivars
>dir, but I don't think that would help since manually removing dump-* files
>didn't solve the problem.
>
>(I changed "stable" to "buster" in sources.list. The computer is a Lenovo
>Thinkpad X1 Carbon, with three Debian versions on it in separate partitions. No
>windows. Separate /home partition. In case any of that is relevant.)
>
>So, it seems it's somehow stuck on efivars being full, when it isn't?!

ACK. Please try a reboot, let's see if that helps.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
'There is some grim amusement in watching Pence try to run the typical
 "politician in the middle of a natural disaster" playbook, however
 incompetently, while Trump scribbles all over it in crayon and eats some
 of the pages.'   -- Russ Allbery