efibootmgr help

[Chris Murphy]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Paul Cartwright <pbcartwright at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/28/2015 06:40 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> Due to many things, including UEFI, and GRUB being overly complicated,
>> and each distro forking GRUB, and also not always keeping it up to
>> date with upstream, there are many variations in GRUB behavior
>> possible. So it's not necessarily the case a given grub.cfg contains
>> menu entries for all kernels/distros on the system. It might contain
>> only entries for a particular distribution.
> well, I know when I installed fedora, grub had entries for windows 10
> and 3 fedora kernels.
> when I installed ubuntu after that, ubuntu became the default, and grub
> had 3 entries for fedora, plus windows 10, plus ubuntu.

The central problem is that the distros are on a continuum among
ambivalence, incompetence, and malicious when it comes to multiboot
cooperation. And GRUB upstream has done a lot of Rube Goldberg
innovation to try to solve this problem but then ultimately it all
breaks.

For multiboot, GRUB has failed the distros, the distros have failed
GRUB by effectively forking it, and each other. And even though
proposals have been made to fix this problem, the bottom line is, the
distros could not possibly care less than they do now, or it'd get
fixed.

> when I rebooted into fedora, and installed the latest kernel, THEN I had
> issues with grub, because I didn't know how to update the grub that was
> installed, and I didn't know how to update the fedora grub & have the
> system use that to boot from.

You'd have to provide detailed information about machine state at each
step of the way in order for an autopsy to be possible, and know what
the cause of the problem was. All i can say is, you shouldn't have to
update the Fedora grub.cfg manually, this is done fairly reliably by
grubby. But only the Fedora grub.cfg is so modified. The Ubuntu
grub.cfg which also contains Fedora boot entries, does not. And
conversely when you update Ubuntu kernels, only its grub.cfg is
updated, not Fedora's.



> every time you boot into a specific distro, update the system, and
> install a new kernel, well, then grub needs to be updated. MY problem
> is, I want to keep ubuntu updated, but I always want fedora grub to be
> the default.. I don't think they thought about all these situations when
> they created grub...

Or did but didn't think it would be like running over the user's foot
with a backhoe.

If you weren't confused, I'd have been surprised.


> I thought I had my partitions written down, so I would know what I had
> where... but this /boot/efi and /EFI/fedora & /EFI/ubuntu has totally
> screwed my mind up.
> I am running fedora, but I mounted my ubuntu partition to look at the
> EFI/ubuntu folder but.... it wasn't there.

It won't be, the Ubuntu /boot/efi/EFI directory is on sda1, so is
Windows. The Fedora one is on sda8. This can be consolidated, but it's
really the least of your problems, even if it reduces the confusion
that ensues from having two EFI system partitions.




-- 
Chris Murphy