[arch-general] efibootmgr doesn't change boot order!

[Maarten de Vries]

On 28-12-2020 10:42, Peter K Haokip via arch-general wrote:
> I read an forum entry from nearly 6 years ago about am efibootmgr bug that
> Doesn't let you change the boot order on a multi OS system if you have arch
> linux as the default OS.  Had some users report this as well in other
> forums.
> Now i am facing the that problem in my system with arch ubuntu and windows.
>
> when i change the boot order , it shows the change 'temporarily' but when i
> restart it boots the default (Arch linux Grub ) and the  change disappears.
>
> I faced this issue last month and gave up on it since I couldn't find any
> detailed resource on this on the net.
> This list may be my last hope.
>
> If anybody could give some direction , would be much appreciated.
>
> regards,
> khaithang39

Hey,

It could be a motherboard problem. Sadly I've seen more motherboards 
with weird bugs in their UEFI implementation than without. You could try 
to change the boot order through the motherboard firmware interface 
(often called "the BIOS" even if that isn't technically correct anymore) 
and see if that helps.

Another thing that may have happened is that you installed grub as 
portable bootloader. It will be called `efi/boot/bootx64.efi` on the EFI 
system partition if that happened. A bootloader under that name is 
auto-detected by the motherboard, even if you didn't add a boot entry 
for it manually. Perhaps your motherboard always favors such bootloaders 
over the normal boot entries.

If this is the case, you could install grub as non-portable bootloader 
by not passing `--removable` to `grub-install`, and then delete 
`efi/boot/bootx64.efi`. Alternatively, you might also be able to 
configure your motherboard to prefer regular boot entries before running 
`bootx64.efi` from that partition.

I hope this helps,

-- Maarten