Boot manager with serial console for UEFI AMD64.

lekto

Hi, I’m looking for boot manager for my headless machine. Currently I have tried rEfind, but serial console didn’t worked for me [1], and grub, but it also failed because of mdraid [2]. I’m looking for something that allow me to choose kernel and edit command line. What are my options?

[1] https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1155637.html
[2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/568956

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2022 3:57 pm Post subject:

I'd imagine refind would also puke on mdraid because EFI wants an ESP marked partition, and not sure if you mdraid it, what would EFI think? Might be able to just run as-is however. As stated in the bug report, there were problems found during the installation that's outside the scope of the tools - efivars partition does not appear to be enabled for the user. Note that the bug reports are over 6 years old and should have propagated up.

In any case, I believe on one EFI machine I just manually kept two ESPs on the two disks synced and ran the rest of the disks MDRAID1. However this is an IA64 box and I was running elilo on it...

My hw is too old, though technically my current server should support EFI boot, alas I'm using CSM on it...
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lekto · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2022 4:50 pm Post subject:

Refind is okayish with mdraid, I have already two machines with rEFInd on mirror with metadata=1.0, which stores metadata at the end of partition and for systems that are not aware of it they look like regular partitions. Only bugs I found are I have doubled entries for memtest, and it complained about unable to find device for /dev/mdXXX, but it worked anyway.
I also thought about syncing two partition, but mdraid feels like more elegant solution

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:03 pm Post subject:

well, I guess if it worked for refind, then it should work fine for grub2.

What is the exact invocation that you used? It should find the right drive based on efivars.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

lekto · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:08 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:20 pm Post subject:

Try adding --removable to your grub-install as a workaround?
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

lekto · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:46 pm Post subject:

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2022 2:50 pm Post subject:

Did grub-mkconfig generate something or did it end up creating an empty file?
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

lekto · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2022 3:18 pm Post subject:

It doesn't created grub.cfg, if I run it without any parameters I get only error.

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2022 4:13 pm Post subject:

At this point you could simply write your own grub.cfg as the hard part is done : getting grub installed. Shouldn't be too hard if you don't want funky submenus that grub-mkconfig does.

One thing you also could do at this point to fake it if you don't want to write your own grub.cfg:

0. Make sure your bzImage, initramfs, etc. are installed on your RAID EFI boot partition
1. umount and mdadm --stop your boot/EFI RAID
2. mount one of the RAID member partitions READONLY at /boot
3. run grub-mkconfig -o /tmp/grub.cfg
4. umount the member
5. mdadm --assemble and mount the raid again
6. mv /tmp/grub.cfg to your RAID

Again this is a workaround...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

lekto · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:26 am Post subject:

I finally figured it out. I wanted to make it simpler than disassembling raid. My idea was to mount ESP into /boot/esp, then install grub, kernel, initramfs and grub.cfg into /boot, then rsync them into /boot/esp, but it failed with same error. Then I noticed that grub-mkconfig was complaining about -part2, which contains my ZFS datapool, so I added libzfs flag to grub and it worked. I didn’t thought about this before, because kernel and initramfs are stored on vfat.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2022 12:23 pm Post subject:

cool, thought part2 was your ESP/boot partition. Would have been nice to know what the partition tables were (and supposedly the disassembly would have revealed that you had some issue with grub handling your root partition versus the boot partition)...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2022 1:09 pm Post subject:

lekto,

I have my EFI system partition on RAID1.

EFI Firmware is unaware of RAID, just like grub-legacy.
The EFI system partition on RAID1 must use metadata 0.90. so that the metadata is at the end of the raid set and more importantly, the filesystem starts at the start, where the EFI Firmware will look.

Its RAID1 as seen by the kernel and the raid is just ignored by the EFI firmware.

Create a EFI boot entry for each element of the mirror and add them all to the boot order.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

lekto · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2022 1:26 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2022 1:37 pm Post subject:

lekto,

Correct. Thank you.