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Re: "Bug" in Debian Installer?



On 21/04/2023 11:26, David Wright wrote:
On Fri 21 Apr 2023 at 09:48:43 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote:

Opt-out variant for ESP sounds reasonable for me. However I am unsure
if it is possible to complete installation with no ESP at all.

If you mean: to install Grub but not write to the ESP,

No, I did not go so far. I wrote about partitioning screen. It is possible to select ESP partition and mark it "Do not use". My expectation is that it should prevent installing grub to ESP. However it is easy to forget about the "K" flag (partition will be used by installer).

My point is that if a partition is marked for usage as ESP then it is not "without explicit notification and permission".

┌─────────────────┤ [!] Install the GRUB boot loader ├──────────────────┐

Is it shown in the case of default debconf priority or it is necessary to switch to "low"?

Frankly speaking, from this text it is unclear for me if the question is related to putting files to EFI/debian or to creation of new BootXXXX NVRAM variable with possible modification of BootOrder.

│ The following other operating systems have been detected on this      │
│ computer: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)                              │
│                                                                       │
│ If all of your operating systems are listed above, then it should be  │
│ safe to install the boot loader to your primary drive (UEFI           │
│ partition/boot record).

Side note. I do not think it is safe to install *Debian* boot loader when another *Debian* is detected. It will overwrite EFI/debian/grub.cfg and so will make earlier installed debian not bootable. Either I missed something or it is fragile to manage grub configuration shared by 2 independent debian (or other linux distributions) systems.

Bullseye had a misfeature where it would, even on a BIOS machine,
solicit installing to the fallback location.

Do you mean installing grub to EFI/BOOT (layout for removable storage)? I have an almost 10 years old HP laptop with buggy firmware. The easiest way to make linux bootable is to put grub into EFI/BOOT (and remove fbx64.efi fallback binary that attempts to adjust BootXXXX and ignored BootOrder on each boot). It is possible to select any boot entry from F9 menu, but by default it boots from EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi.

2. On a laptop having ESP partitions on 2 disks, both ones are marked
for usage as ESP. I am unsure if it causes installation error later or
grub is installed on both ones (taking into account single /boot/efi
mount point).

I would assume not, as people complain about this as a single point of
failure in UEFI booting. I haven't tried repeating "Install the GRUB
boot loader" from the Main Menu, but I don't see why it shouldn't
work. But I don't think that that would get you two entries in NVRAM
without playing some tricks.

On that HP laptop I manually installed grub to second ESP. The result is 2 indistinguishable entries in F9 boot menu. The text is taken from shim/BOOTX64.CSV, no other hints displayed.


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