When I installed
Debian on my MacBookAir4,1 in 2012, there was no way
to do it without manual intervention yet. I followed
a tutorial on how to boot
GRUB from the
EFI Boot option
in the MacBook EFI Menu. I did not want to fiddle
with
rEFIt, and I didn't want to boot GRUB by default.
When I want to boot Linux, I press the
Option key during power up
and select
EFI Boot from the Apple boot menu.
Unfortunately, I neglected to collect notes about how I
did it manually. However, Linux 3.2 is getting a bit old, so I
finally wanted to replace my manual boot configuration
with something handled by the package system.
In case you don't have
/boot/efi in
/etc/fstab yet,
you need to mount
/dev/sda1 on
/boot/efi for the following to work.
The documentation I found on the net suggested to just
reinstall
grub-efi-amd64 and everything should work.
That is not quite true. When I do
# apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi-amd64
Nothing changes in
/boot/efi.
I sort of expected that
/boot/efi/EFI/debian would be
created, and the EFI image should be placed in there. However,
that did not happen. Why is that?
It turns out that when I installed
grub-efi-amd64 manually in 2012, I
created
/boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi which is the EFI fallback location,
and apparently exactly what I want on this MacBook which does not support
multiple boot options.
Matthew Garrett posted an interesting article called
Booting with EFI which sheds light on this issue, go and read it.
Looking at
/var/lib/dpkg/info/grub-efi-amd64.postinst revealed
that
/boot/efi/EFI/debian needs to be created manually first.
If this directory does not exist,
grub-efi-amd64 basically
does nothing on reinstall.
Running
grub-install will actually create a new EFI image.
However, it is being created in the wrong place for this machine.
# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi
does the trick. Now
/boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi gets
created. However, since I don't want to make GRUB the default,
there is yet another manual step to do:
# cp /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
Now I can select
EFI Boot after pressing the
Option key during
startup. GRUB is loaded and Linux 3.13 gets booted. Strike!
Looking more closely reveals that there is actually a way to
tell
grub-install that it should install to
the fallback location directly. The
--removable option does that.
For the faint of heart, what does
grub-install actually do
on an EFI system? It does not directly write to the disk, therefore
it does not need a device specified. It looks for files in
/boot/efi and assumes the EFI partition is mounted there.
So for my use case, the correct way to upgrade to a current GRUB EFI image
should have been:
# grub-install --removable --target=x86_64-efi
Meanwhile I've been made aware of
Bug#708430.
I guess it would be nice to have an option in
/etc/default/grub
which would indicate that installation to the fallback location
is desired. While this is a rather ugly hack to work around a stupid
limitation, it is still what I'd like on this MacBook. At least
since I don't have a triplle boot situation. Fallback location works
fine with just two OSes coexisting.