[arch-general] Gummiboot and EFISTUB booting irregularities

[Mike Cloaked]

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 10:30 PM, Bigby James <bigby.james at crepcran.com>
wrote:

> On 07/09, Murari wrote:
>
> > When I start my laptop (or restart it) and select the Arch Linux entry
> in the
> > gummiboot menu, I sometimes only see a blank screen instead of any error
> > messages or any of the usual boot text.
>
> This is a known issue, and yes, it's hard to describe or pin down. Some
> UEFI
> firmwares just don't seem to play nice with the kernel every couple
> versions or
> so. The systems that are effected seem almost random, which is probably
> why it's
> been around for so long. There are two workarounds that seem to work for
> people:
>
> - Downgrade the kernel and wait until the next update.
> - Build a kernel with ABS. For some reason this resolves the issue on some
>   machines. And I don't mean build a *custom* kernel---for some reason,
> simply
>   downloading the PKGBUILD for the 'linux' package, running makepkg and
>   installing it seems to eliminate boot problems for some people.
>
> Personally, after this happened to me a third time I just started booting
> in
> legacy mode with Syslinux.


Another option that seems to work reliably is to use your normal uefi boot
loader/manager to chainload grub and let grub boot the kernel if uefi boot
fails due to the well-known stub loader bug. The problem appears to be only
when booting uefi with the efi stub loader, whereas grub does not use the
efi stub loader and appears not to be affected. On my own systems with
rEFInd, I have a refind stanza that chainloads a grub standalone entry, and
if there is a problem uefi booting a specific kernel on that machine, then
I can simply reboot to the grub entry and let that boot the kernel. Having
that as a fallback boot method should allow you to boot a kernel if it
turns out that your machine is affected by the efi stub loader bug. Then
simply wait for the next kernel or rebuild your kernel as per the previous
post and check if that helps.

-- 
mike c