Bug#977126: linux: No armel kernel can be booted by grub-efi-arm:armel

[Ryutaroh Matsumoto]

Source: linux
Version: 5.9.11-1
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: pkg-grub-devel at alioth-lists.debian.net

Dear Maintainer,

grub-efi-arm:armel package remains almost unusable for very long time.
To boot a kernel in UEFI mode, it must be compiled with CONFIG_EFI.
But no Debian armel kernel (specifically linux-image-marvell or
linux-image-rpi) is built with CONFIG_EFI.
This leaves armel grub-efi-arm package almost useless.

For example, trying to boot linux-image-marvell by grub-efi-arm:armel
shows the following message:

Welcome to GRUB!

error: no suitable video mode found.
  Booting `Debian GNU/Linux'

Loading Linux 5.9.0-4-marvell ...
error: plain image kernel not supported - rebuild with CONFIG_(U)EFI_STUB
enabled.
Loading initial ramdisk ...
error: you need to load the kernel first.

On the other hand, grub-efi-arm:armel can boot linux-image-armmp:armhf.

This feature/bug leaves grub-efi-arm:armel almost useless,
so I chose "important" priority.

Best regards, Ryutaroh Matsumoto


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: arm64 (aarch64)

Kernel: Linux 5.9.0-4-arm64 (SMP w/4 CPU threads)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_CRAP
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)