UEFI boot on X220

[caph]

I'm in front of a new (well, 2nd hand, but new to me ) ThinkPad X220. I would love to give Gentoo a try after several years of using Debian. So far I'm installed a statge3 system and configured most of the stuff (including a kernel build based on an old .config file from a X220 user). It is a standard hdd in the laptop, if this is relevant.

But what really doesn't work is the bootloader installation. It's been ages since I installed grub by hand and with EFI and UEFI it's not as trivial as it once was. I assume that X220 needs an UEFI bootable grub - at least my BIOS says UEFI booting is enabled.

My partitions look like this:

[JelteF]

Just checking if you tried the first hit on google: https://superuser.com/questions/678976/installing-arch-linux-issue-with-modprobe-efivars

[caph]

There is only /sys/firmware/{acpi,memmap} outside the chroot and as I said modprobe efivars says "no such device" when using the livecd image. This problem seems to be pretty old as an entry in the discussion in the wiki suggests. But even when including efivarfs (which works) doesn't give me any new folder in /sys/firmware....

Just to clarify my request: I would be fine without grub, too. Using an direct boot setup like it is described in the Handbook would also work perfectly here. But sadly the same problem appears when using efibootmgr

[JelteF]

Hmm okay, sounds fair. I don't have much experience with EFI/UEFI, two things that I would try. The first one is use modprobe efivarfs (with an F) as suggested in the wiki. The next would be to use a livecd for a different and easier distro (like mint/ubuntu/debian), since they probably have the needed modules. I have actually always installed gentoo this way (except for the first time). That way you have working WiFi, a terminal that scrolls up and browser that is not command line based, which makes googling and copy pasting a lot easier.

[ct85711]

Like Jeltef mentioned, you going need to use another distro's livecd to setup EFI; gentoo's cd's (I don't know if systemrescue cd supports it or not) does NOT support EFI. Sadly, to setup EFI, you need to first boot with a EFI compatible boot cd. Once in EFI mode, modprobe efivars, then you can go ahead and use efibootmgr.

[caph]

Actually, efivars now is completely outdated and succeeded by the efivarfs module -- this happened in mid 2013 as far as I read. The efivarfs module loads perfectly under a recent Arch iso for example. The problem is, even with this module loaded and mounted into the chroot, efibootmgr still shows the very same message.

Although ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars shows that this very folder is populated within the chroot environment. I don't get what the bloody problem is...
I mounted /mnt/gentoo{sys,proc,dev} and even the efivarfs folder within the fitting subfolder via mount -t efivarfs none /mnt/gentoo/sys/firmware/efi/efivars. Than I chrooted into the main folder, did a source /etc/profile (not necessary, but shouldn't hurt either) and called efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 2 -L "Linux" -l "\efi\boot\bootx64.efi". Still it says

[JelteF]

This sounds like there is something wrong with efibootmgr, as it doesn't seem to use the files that are apparently there. Do you have the most recent version of efibootmgr from portage? Gentoo is sometimes quite slow with marking stuff as stable. The latest stable version is 0.5.4-r1 and the newest version is 0.11.0, so that is quite a difference and I can see on GitHub that the 0.5.4 release was in 2008. You can install it like this:

[khayyam]

[CH2IS]

Hello,

I've been booting an X220 in UEFI mode without many problems.

As mentioned previously, you will need a live USB which will boot in UEFI.

I use Gentoo's "Iron Penguin" ISO which you can find here: https://www.gentoo.org/news/20140826-livedvd.xml - but you could also use another distro such as Fedora.

As an aside, this is a great way to do a Gentoo install because you can get the handbook up in Firefox/Chromium and use the laptop to surf the net, watch videos, listen to music etc while everything's compiling.

Anyway, here's a rough outline of the steps I use:

[caph]

Thanks guys, you helped me a lot so far. The efibootmgr of the stage-3 installation was pretty old and I updated to the newest one.

It does run without any errors, but I'm still a bit lost when it comes to UEFI without grub. Is there any guide on what to do exactly to get this thing going? I do have a compiled kernel, a working efibootmgr binary and a virgin fat32 partition which is my /boot (aka /dev/sda1). What are the next steps? The handbook only features a very incomplete quick-version of UEFI unfortunately

CH2IS, your version is using grub which is started by the BIOS and than starts the kernel, right?

[khayyam]