NVRAM changes not persistent with efibootmgr

[Gareth Williams]

On 11/07/14 06:24, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Jul 10, 2014, at 4:56 AM, "Williams, Gareth" <gareth at garethwilliams.me.uk> wrote:
>
>> My question therefore is: Does anaconda do something else after running 'efibootmgr' to make it permanent? Or: Why can anaconda update NVRAM using efibootmgr, while I can't?
> 'no bootable device' sounds suspiciously like a BIOS message. It's not a failure message I'd expect from an UEFI systems due to how it does fallback - or at least should. It should arrive at worst to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI which ought to be shim.efi, which with help from fallback.efi ought to write a new entry in NVRAM for itself.
Why would it come up in 'BIOS' mode?  I've not changed any settings on 
the laptop to enable that - unless my laptop's firmware automatically 
does it when it can't find any EFI to boot.  But as you said that it 
should arrive at BOOTX64.EFI (which is present) then even that theory 
falls at the first hurdle.
> Anyway, the problem you're facing is it's unclear whether it's a firmware bug or a kernel bug. I'd make sure the firmware is updated. See if users are having problems with that version if it's already at the latest version and was recently posted. And then use newer kernels and see if the behavior changes - the Fedora 20 media is using kernel 3.11.10, and 3.16 is mainline.
I didn't boot from the CD image - I merely used the EFI and GRUB from 
the CD, then edited the GRUB line to point to boot from (hd0,gpt5) and 
so on, so that it booted my regular Fedora 20 install.  That was running 
3.14.9 at the time - it's now running 3.15.3.
> So it might be worth grabbing a Fedora 21 pre-alpha build to see if you get different results making NVRAM modifications with efibootmgr.
  When I experimented last night (since the kernel upgrade) efibootmgr 
changes seem to work!  That proves your kernel theory, or it's something 
else completely unrelated.
Thanks for you reply. All's well that ends well, as they say.  And I 
learnt something in the process.

Gareth