[Macchiato] Persistent boot variables

[Steve McIntyre]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 12:27:26AM +0000, Matthew Bentham wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>My firmware has got itself into a state where it always wants to "PXE Boot Over IPv4", and I have to press escape over the serial console to make it proceed to the EFI shell. In the firmware I'm running at the moment I don't seem to be able to set any persistent variables. I'm using EDK2 with the marvell-armada-wip branch OpenPlatformPackage (as per Wiki) and I understand that Leif's build also can't support persistent variables yet?
>
>I've worked around it for now by copying grub to fs0:\EFI\boot\bootaa64.efi but is there a better way?

Hey Matthew,

AFAIK there are two options for now, until the persistent variable
storage is finished/upstreamed:

1. Write a startup.nsh script which runs grub from the normal
   installation path

2. In Debian I added support ages ago for working around
   broken/incomplete UEFI implementations, adding an option to copy
   grub into the removable media path (like you've done) and then
   *continue* to do so on upgrades. That will remove the (real)
   possibility that a future grub upgrade will leave you with
   inconsistent grub binary and modules and a non-booting
   system. "dpkg-reconfigure -plow grub-efi-arm64" will let you
   configure things easily.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
"Further comment on how I feel about IBM will appear once I've worked out
 whether they're being malicious or incompetent. Capital letters are forecast."
 Matthew Garrett, http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjg59/30675.html