Bug#703363: rescue-mode needs to load efivars
Package: rescue-mode
Version: 1.35
Severity: important
Tags: d-i
Hi,
When debugging and trying to fix an amd64 system installed via UEFI
today, I've found quite a major problem. Since we generated wheezy d-i
RC1, there has been a kernel update which modified symbols *without*
bumping ABI. (To be fair, bumping the ABI would have left a similar
issue anyway.) Using the d-i RC1 netinst and running in rescue mode,
it probes and loads all its hardware support correctly. But: it
doesn't load efivars.ko during early system boot. That's not
*necessarily* an issue, but later on, when wanting to run
grub-installer to re-install the bootloader, it tried to load efivars
then. At that point, the efivars.ko it tried to load was the one from
the installed system; that came from a later kernel version than the
currently-running rescue kernel and it failed to load.
So: to make sure we don't get this issue in future, we should make
sure that rescue-mode loads the right version of efivars.ko to match
its kernel. I don't personally know how to do that, or I'd have a
patch here already!
As an aside... do we need to think about this in more general terms
for all amd64 systems and attempt to force-load the efivars module at
early boot? Unlike most other hardware-related modules, it's never
going to trigger on udev...
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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