Re: Assortment of Issues with EFI on Mac

[Jake Thomas]

Thank you Vladmir for the response : D ! I'm new to the Grub mailing lists, and 
these bugs have been on my mind for some while.

My experiences differ with a couple things you said. You said that you cannot 
depend on drive order. One of the few things that has worked 100% of the time 
with my adventures in Grub has been Grub calling the hard drive (by "hard 
drive" I include thumb drives) it is on the first hard drive. In all my 
experiences, regardless of machine and regardless of whether using EFI or BIOS, 
the hard drive with Grub on it is recognized by Grub as the first hard disk. 
That's the one thing I can count on. What if the UUID changes? What if I have 
more than one thing with the same UUID? In the bug I describe where Grub boots 
the internal instead of the thumb drive, Grub is disobeying my instruction from 
the grub.cfg file to boot (hd0, [whatever]). hd0 is my thumb drive. I have 
confirmed this with ls (list) at the Grub command line. Listing the contents of 
a partition in hd0 shows contents of my thumb drive, not the internal hard 
drive. Then it boots the internal instead anyways, even though I said to boot 
hd0, which I just confirmed is my thumb drive and not the internal.

Ok, I messed up on technical terminology with the "carriage return." I meant 
whatever it is you get from pressing the "enter" key while in a text editor. 
That is, vertical space. If there is any vertical space after the last "}" from 
the last menu entry, grub doesn't load that config file. You would have to go 
back in and delete the vertical space at the bottom so that the "}" is the very 
last line. Not just the last visible line, the last line period. You can check 
by using the arrow keys to try and go down to the next line. If you get to a 
blank line, you need to delete that vertical space. If the cursor doesn't move, 
you're good.

Why shouldn't the normal mod be baked into the image? Isn't it vial for it to 
be baked into the image? How else is it going to come up with a background 
image and menu entries and not be in rescue mode? I want it to go to the menu 
automatically. I don't want to have to type "insmod normal". Especially if I am 
forging a multi-bootable thumb drive for someone who is not a Grub guru.

With my grub.cfg file for 64-bit EFI, even when I didn't change anything in the 
file at all, behavior of Grub was not consistent across all boots, and all the 
while the drive mapping stayed the same; hd0 was always the thumb drive. So I 
know the bug is either in the EFI or in Grub. Not my grub.cfg. It usually 
works. And I am loading a unicode font file.

New Year's is getting close, maybe already is in some places around the world.

Cheers,
Jake

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 30, 2011, at 8:54 AM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' 
Serbinenko<address@hidden> wrote:

> On 30.12.2011 14:12, Jake Thomas wrote:
>> //Using version 1.99 of Grub
>> Hello everyone, I've been meaning to submit these bugs for quite a while 
>> now, at least since summer, but have been busy with school and hadn't taken 
>> the time to figure the Grub mailing list out, and was at a loss as to how to 
>> go about submitting bugs.
>> 
>> I have been playing with Grub2 on a thumb drive. I didn't know why it wasn't 
>> booting on the Mac, and, after some research, found out about EFI v.s. BIOS. 
>> After some more research and head-banging, I made some working grub efi 
>> images, put them on my thumb drive, and I could boot Linux off my thumb 
>> drive on a Mac, which uses EFI, not BIOS.
>> 
>> I encountered some issues.
>> 
>> One I call the "temptation error". If Linux is on the internal hard drive of 
>> my Macbook, and I get booted into Grub off my thumb drive via EFI, and I 
>> tell it to load Linux off the thumb drive, Grub finds the Linux on the 
>> internal hard drive too tempting and usually boots that instead. The kernel 
>> and initrd were the same name and path on both the internal hard drive and 
>> thumb drive, so it's not like it got possessed and started looking around 
>> for Linuxes to boot.
>> 
>> When you are on a Macbook with Linux on the internal hard drive with a 
>> kernel and initrd of the same name and path as the kernel and initrd on a 
>> thumb drive with a bootable grub EFI image, and you boot into EFI Grub off 
>> the thumb drive, it seems to, on average, actually succeed in booting off 
>> the thumb drive rather than the internal about 1 in every 14 times. It's 
>> more like it randomly picks a number between 12 and 17 or so, and that's how 
>> many more attempts it will take to get to the next successful attempt to 
>> boot off the thumb drive rather than the internal.
>> 
> It's usually a symptom of duplicate UUID or wrong grub.cfg. You can't rely on 
> drive order. You need to use search -s root -u UUID
>> 
>> 
>> Another one is an often patternistic blackout bug. I can boot my MacBook off 
>> my thumb drive into EFI Grub, select to boot Linux off my thumb drive, and 
>> boot Linux no problem (unless Linux exists on the internal). Then the next 
>> time I try, it might black the screen out. In fact, pressing enter or escape 
>> or any key doesn't do anything, so it actually is crashed-out, rather than 
>> the screen simply having gone black.
>> But here's the interesting part: If I save a copy of grub.cfg to my desktop 
>> (the one in the EFI grub prefix) and then delete it off my thumb drive, and 
>> then boot my MacBook off my thumb drive, I successfully get to a command 
>> line and can boot Linux "by hand." Then I can put the grub.cfg back on, and 
>> it will work next time. Sometimes it follows a simple AB pattern of blacking 
>> out, me deleting grub.cfg, getting to a command line, me putting grub.cfg 
>> back on, Grub booting correctly with a menu and background image and all, 
>> and then the cycle repeats. Though recently I haven't experienced a strict 
>> cycle; it's more of a certain probability of blacking out, to which the fix 
>> is to delete grub.cfg, boot without it, then put it back on.
>> 
> It's possible that it's another symptom of last problem
>> 
>> 
>> And here's a couple of minor bugs (but they still ought to be fixed):
>> 
>> Grub doesn't load a grub.cfg file if it has extra carriage returns at the 
>> end. To someone who doesn't know this and is making a grub.cfg file by hand 
>> for, say, a thumb drive, this can cause a lot of frustration; it sure caused 
>> me a lot of frustration! Grub only loads a grub.cfg file if the last 
>> character is a part of the Grub script, usually a "}".
>> 
> grub.cfg has to be in unix-style newline that is \n=LF. There should be no 
> CR=carriage return at all.
>> When I boot my thumb drive via EFI on my MacBook, it erroneously, for a 
>> brief moment, says "error: prefix not set" and then continues loading Grub 
>> to a menu with a background and everything (unless it blacks out). The 
>> prefix is indeed set and can be confirmed by command line.
> normal mod shouldn't be baked into image. Use grub-install
>> 
>> Also, I have experienced issues with iMacs, but don't have enough definite 
>> testing to really report anything. It wasn't loading the background, had 
>> funny characters around the menu like it does when the font file isn't 
>> present, and it was in portrait rather than in landscape, and if I remember 
>> right, didn't even boot Linux.
>> 
> if you use gfxterm you need to load unifont. If you don't GRUB can't load 
> background image
>> I'm a big fan of Grub. I felt like I found heaven on Earth when I started 
>> understanding it and using it, because I was using syslinux before that (for 
>> thumb drives). Boy! Support for either EFI or BIOS, the ability to have a 
>> pretty background image, font of your choice, so many modules for 
>> anything...it's got so many great things to it! And if these kinks could be 
>> worked out, it'd be even better. If we really do switch to EFI, they better 
>> get fixed.
> That's good to hear. You can drop by in IRC and hopefully we can figure 
> what's wrong with your system and whether any of it is a bug as opposed to 
> wrong manual config
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jake
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Regards
> Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
>