Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2023 18:12:06 +0800
From: RSS <rss@armor-mail.com>
To: ~alpine/users@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Cannot boot 3.18 with UEFI?
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In-Reply-To: <6b9ae3e080c1c10450061f715291a76670343e13.camel@riseup.net>
References: <20230630174332.4b38d6d5@nixosX240>
	<6b9ae3e080c1c10450061f715291a76670343e13.camel@riseup.net>
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On Fri, 30 Jun 2023 12:30:34 +0200
Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf@riseup.net> wrote:

> on my new PC I'm forced to use UEFI, since the new Intel GPU doesn't
> allow to select CSM, for this reason I migrated from syslinux to grub.
> I used syslinux from my Arch Linux install and now I'm using grub from
> the Arch Linux install. The pitfalls I experienced booting Alpine were
> not related to the grub bootloader.
> 
> It's not that terrible as it does sound. Without all those grub
> configs for the configs and automation, it's possible to write a
> clean syslinux alike config for grub [1].

Thanks for the reply, this inspired me to push on, and I do have
progress. I am really stuck on getting to an actual UEFI (eventually
default) boot menu item here, as otherwise my kids will never be able
to safely boot this machine. (What happens when a six-year old plays
with UEFI?: mayhem of the destructive kind. Seen it with my own eyes.
;-)

So I am currently getting Alpine started with rEFInd, which I believe
will not achieve the above default boot objective. Here are my notes,
for posterity and perhaps further comment:

--------------------

Do a surgical single-partition install of Alpine on an already busy
multi-booting machine, and get it booting via UEFI.

The key bit turned out to be in ref 3:

	`If you're going to use EFI, make sure you mount esp partition
	on /boot/efi and set BOOTLOADER=grub and USE_EFI=1, and that
	grub-efi and efibootmgr are installed before running
	setup-disk.`

Where (unspoken!!) `BOOTLOADER=grub and USE_EFI=1` are actually
environment variables which must be set prior to running setup-disk.
There were then promising "EFI" messages as setup-disk did it's stuff,
AND a couple of dodgy looking error messages about not being able to
write files to odd looking locations in the EFI partition.

This STILL somehow did not result in a working UEFI boot entry, but
rEFInd (already installed during earlier struggles) picked it up and is
how I currently boot Alpine.

Ref 5 says this:

	`Note: The loader and initrd file arguments are relative to the
	EFI partition. In a default installation, alpine places these
	files in /boot/, while EFI is mounted to /boot/efi/. You can
	either update fstab to mount EFI at /boot/, or manually copy
	them to /boot/efi/.` 

But, I have tried copying initramfs-lts & vmlinuz-lts into /boot/efi/
to no effect, still no working UEFI boot menu item for Alpine. Mounting
the EFI partition on /boot/ makes me nervous, what bad things then
happen to grub?

Refs:

1.
https://docs.alpinelinux.org/user-handbook/0.1a/Installing/manual.html
2. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation 3.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Setting_up_disks_manually 4.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Dualbooting 5.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Bootloaders