Bug#822941: debian-installer: cannot boot installed on

[Hideki Yamane <henrich@debian.or.jp>]

control: reopen -1
control: tag -1 -moreinfo

On Wed, 17 Aug 2016 17:17:49 +0100
Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> Right, that's exactly what I described in my last mail about this
> bug. If Fedora is installing to the removable media path as a default,
> that is *broken* and *wrong*. This is masking missing UEFI support in
> VirtualBox - it's not saving UEFI variables persistently like qemu
> does when using UEFI.

 I've checked other distro, too.

  Fedora   : boot (= wrong UEFI installation)
  CentOS   : boot (= wrong UEFI installation)
  openSUSE : boot (= wrong UEFI installation)
  Debian   : cannot boot
  Ubuntu   : cannot boot

 As specification, just installing /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/*.efi is NOT good.
 However, from users' view, it prefer Fedora/CentOS/openSUSE behavior to
 Debian and Ubuntu. This is because "install and just boot" is expected.


> > Probably VirtualBox UEFI seeks /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT, not /boot/efi/EFI/${distro}. 
> > I don't know this behavior is okay or not, but it's better to add workaround
> > to d-i, IMHO (for users' convenient).
> 
> There's already support for doing this in d-i for the sake of
> supporting broken firmware implementations. See
> 
>   https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub-efi_installation_to_the_removable_media_path
> 
> for more information. It's even preseedable. So I'm closing this bug.

 Thanks, it is very helpful to understand this issue.
 
 And I want to propose you to add workaround for VirtualBox via exec 
 force_efi_extra_removable _automatically_. If d-i detects it runs on VBox,
 then install /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/*.efi is better for users. Probably VBox users
 who want to install Debian can ignore co-exist other OSes since they don't
 do such installation (that is VM!), so no any harm. You can know if it is
 installed on VBox by running dmidecode.

>$ sudo dmidecode -s baseboard-product-name
>VirtualBox


 And also, maybe collecting information for broken UEFI hardware and
 add such workaround is better feature for users.
 (Yes, I know it's dirty workaround but it's really handy).


-- 
Regards,

 Hideki Yamane     henrich @ debian.or.jp/org
 http://wiki.debian.org/HidekiYamane