UEFI installation media => Boot Linux System

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Duck and Google don’t seem to be able to offer me any documentation on what should be expected of, or how to proceed using, this boot media selection.

When I tried today, not needing to but only testing in preparation for a possible response to a forum plea for help, I get an apparently proper list of installed systems. I make a selection of 15.1, then it wants me to select a kernel to boot, but the list it presents is not from 15.1’s partition. Instead, the list is from all partitions on which any openSUSE kernel is present. I pick what I believe is the latest for 15.1, then it wants a system partition selection to be made. It offers no option to use the root partition pointed to in the matching initrd. I proceed to choose the by-label selection. Next it wants me to edit kernel options, presenting me with root=<partitionlabel> as starting point. From this point, nothing I do, or not, generates anything more than an instant

Sorry, system didn’t boot
message.

For the prior test, the 15.1 selection is on GPT SSD /dev/sdc9. On tty4’s last line was message:

kexec_file: kernel signature verification failed (-129).
On tty3 was boot parameters confirmation:
going to boot sdc9:/boot/vmlinuz…, append="root=/dev/disk/by-label/<label> 3 noresume video=1440x900
matching what I typed, then:
mount: dev = /dev/sdc9, dir = /mnt, flags = 0x1
/dev/sdc9: type = ext4.
On tty9 I tried dmesg, but received command not found.

Next I rebooted 15.1 USB media again, but selected TW, which is on GPT SSD /dev/sdc7. Net result, another instant didn’t boot message.

/sda and /sdb are MBR disks containing a mix of legacy partitions, most comprising RAID1 devices. I can boot from sda’s Grub via BIOS F12 menu, but UEFI defaults to sdc control:

efibootmgr BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0001,0005,0007,0003,0004
Boot0000* opensusetw
Boot0001* opensuse
Boot0003* Hard Drive
Boot0004* CD/DVD Drive
Boot0005* UEFI:  USB DISK 2.0 PMAP
Boot0007* UEFI:  USB DISK 2.0 PMAP

Any suggestions? Does this boot selection ever work?

2

Maybe you could start by explaining what you actually did.

I have never seen anything similar to what you described. So you must be doing something different from what I normally do.

Perhaps you are using the install DVD or similar, and choosing the option to boot a system. If I ever did that, it was more than 10 years ago and did not involve UEFI. And yes, I assume you have to choose a system to boot and it is probably confusing if you have many systems installed. But I’m just guessing. Please tell us what you did.

3

Hi
Does the system allow you to browse to a specific efi file and select that to boot from?

Also what about the verbose output from efibootmgr (the -v option)?

If you can boot from a live system via efi, then you can always blow away the exisiting efi options and just re-create (one of the bonuses of using uefi)?

4

You guessed exactly right:

  1. boot installation media (today, on USB, not what I usually do)
  2. scroll down from “Installation” to “More …”
  3. scroll down from “Rescue System” to “Boot Linux System”
    *] proceed as I wrote
5

No. This is early installation, ncurses, before network setup starts.

Also what about the verbose output from efibootmgr (the -v option)?
All as expected.

If you can boot from a live system via efi, then you can always blow away the exisiting efi options and just re-create (one of the bonuses of using uefi)?
As I thought I made clear enough, this is only testing installation media’s “Boot Linux System” functionality. All installed systems are booting normally, TW, 15.1, 15.0, Buster, Mint, Kubuntu, via custom.cfg presented by TW’s grub.cfg, all on sdc. Installations on sda/sdb boot as expected via BIOS F12 menu and Grub on sda1 (TW, 4.23, 15.0). All I’m trying to do is learn whether and how well “Boot Linux System” from 15.1 media does or is supposed to work, before 15.2 development gets too far along to fix before GA release if broken.

6

Okay. I will experiment with that tomorrow.

7

On many new BIOS versions (Dell’s newest for sure) I have found that:

You have to select an UEFI USB or USB CD to install a UEFI version or the installer see you booted BIOS and installs the BIOS version.

All newer Dell BIOS will not boot a hard disk (SSD or nvme) in BIOS mode so you get a boot failure.

I had to reinstall OpenSUSE 15.1 a second time with UEFI booting the USB to get it to work on a Dell 7490 laptop.

This is proof that Microsoft has too much influence - UEFI is just copy protection for Windows (yeah, they say it is more secure - BS I say until the PC Bios has data in a separate storage key from the executable storage key - it is vulnerable to hacking - even UEFI can be hacked - the fact that you can update the BIOS without hardware jumpers to prevent it. )

8

This thread is only about UEFI, and where loading the installation media has already succeeded, or there would be no menu from which to select “Boot Linux System”. This presupposes using kexec, and any BIOS issues are already past - or does it?

9

If secure-boot is enabled, there might still be issues. It is my impression that “kexec” has intentional limitations to avoid it being usable to bypass secure-boot.

10

Okay, I experimented with it.

My setup: I have a system (in a virtual machine) running Leap 15.2Alpha.
The Leap 15.1 iso is attached as a DVD device.

The system itself is using legacy partitioning, so no UEFI involved. There is only one system installed on that virtual machine. I was trying to keep to the simplest possible case for my first test.

I booted the DVD, scrolled down to “more …” and then “boot linux system”.

The DVD itself booted appropriately.

It gave me a single choice – the system on “/dev/sda5” to boot. I went with that.
It offered only a single kernel for booting (there is only one kernel on that system).
It gave me a choice of device names for the root device. But all referred to the same device, so any of them should have worked. I went with the “by-uuid” device.

I got back a message that the kernel failed to boot. This was almost immediate, as if it failed to even load the kernel.

I rebooted, tried again – this time I used “/dev/sda5” as the root device. The result was the same.

My observations:

  1. It is looking to me as if this doesn’t actually work.
  2. This is too complicated. It is easier to explain to somebody how to boot to the rescue system, setup “chroot” and use the “chroot” environment to fix things. There are just too many choices to make where you probably don’t know what it is that you are choosing.
  3. If there isn’t a bug report, it is probably because the system is too complicated for people to deal with, even to the extent of reporting a bug.
11

I did a fresh 15.2 NET CD UEFI installation to a freshly GPT partitioned and formatted 40G HD: 320M ESP, 800M swap, 8000M EXT4 /, 29000 EXT4 /home. I kept the CD inserted, and on first boot subsequent to installation, selected the CD in UEFI mode to boot from, selected “Boot Linux System” after selecting “More”, with the same result: “Sorry, system didn’t boot.” Booting the freshly installed 15.2 system normally works fine.

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1146017 filed.

12

Thanks. I will probably comment on that bug later today.

13

It looks as if “kexec” is broken.

I booted to the rescue system, then tried to manually boot the linux system with “kexec” at the command line.

It failed silently. I’ve added a comment about that to the bug report.