Bug#1135731: does not boot on raspberry pi 4 (grub_memcpy not found)

[Marc Haber]

On Tue, May 05, 2026 at 11:34:05AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>On Tue, May 05, 2026 at 12:05:00PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
>>Package: grub-efi-arm64
>>Version: 2.14-2
>>Severity: normal
>>X-Debbugs-Cc: mh+debian-bugs at zugschlus.de
>>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'm running Debian unstable on a Raspberry PI 4. The firmwware loads
>>u-boot, u-boot loads grub-efi-arm64, grub-efi-arm64 drops me on a grub
>>rescue shell with "error: symbol `grub_memcpy' not found.". Going back
>>to grub-efi 2.12-9+deb13u1 from trixie works without other changes to
>>the system.
>>
>>The information given below originates from the system after doing the
>>downgrade.
>
>OK, this is 99.9% certain to be a mismatch between the grub core image
>and the modules installed in /boot/grub.

After a few rounds of debugging, I concur that your assessment is 
correct.

>If you're on a Pi, then it's
>very likely you're booting using the removable media path. Could you
>give us the output of "ls -lR /boot/efi" as root please?

I use the raspi firmware partitions as ESP and mount them as /boot/efi. 
Grub is thus accessible as /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubaa64.efi and you're 
right that the grub 2.12 image that is placed there does not get updated 
when I do grub-install. Hence, the boot with the 2.14 modules in 
/boot/grub fails; setting prefix to the backup copy /boot/grub-works 
helps here.

The efivars error message that other people noticed is due to the fact 
that the Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't have persistent efivars.

Can this cause the grubaa64.efi to not be replaced during grub-install? 
Which software component in the stack is supposed to update 
/boot/efi/EFI on grub-update?

Whatever that component is, it does not seem to do its job.

Greetings from Mini Debconf Hamburg
Marc

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