Powering up my new mobo!
Ok, blinky lights on the memory bus are back in fashion... but where are the switches to load a word into core memory? 🤔
Powering up my new mobo!
Ok, blinky lights on the memory bus are back in fashion... but where are the switches to load a word into core memory? 🤔
Testing the new motherboard and swapping it into my old chassis: 2 hours.
Fixing the damn UEFI vars to get #ArchLinux to boot again: 3 hours and counting 🤬
Looks like the MSI firmware is deleting the GRUB boot entries that I create with efibootmgr... 🤬
I tried creating an entry from the built-in UEFI Shell, and it also got deleted.
What's going on?!?
@penguin42 Well, first I gotta boot somehow...
@codewiz latest firmware?
Other MSI users are complaining about this same behavior:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1874820#p1874820
Ok, simply renaming grub to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI made it appear as a boot menu option without even creating an EFI boot entry for it!
I found a tip in the awesome Arch Wki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Default/fallback_boot_path
#ArchLinux
lol, MSI... your UEFI firmware sucks even more than the others I've seen!
@tokudan Thanks, that was my first guess, but I looked everywhere in the setup interface and couldn't find a way to disable this "smart" feature.
@codewiz not sure if it's relevant, in my setup I have an option about uefi being protected or not (not just secure boot) and that accepts changes, but throws away all changes on reboot
@tokudan I found a workaround:
https://mstdn.io/@codewiz/108143814846249839
On the upside, this new machine (i7-12700F 4.9GHz DDR5 5600) builds wezterm from sources in 2m05s.
For comparison, my Thinkpad X1 (i7-10710U @ 4.7 GHz) takes 8m56s.
@penguin42 See other branch of this thread for the root cause (TL;DR: MSI built broken assumptions in their UEFI boot code)
@codewiz Is it actually remembering anything between boots - even minor settings?
Updating the BIOS...
Wait, wasn't it supposed to be called "firmware" nowadays? More confusion due to fucking UEFI 💢
Anyway, I like that you can just put the new image on a usb stick nowadays. No DOS floppy, no Windows utility...
@codewiz I am 97% of the way to ditching my Dell Latitude e6420 because I see no encouragement from Dell for updating my 2012 machine with a BIOS update: I am running Linux Mint.
My battery is down to 17% post-upgrads and I see no online tutorials. Did you see any useful tutorial?
@codewiz Maybe that's what was happening on my machine. It was acting strange. I moved from Arch-based to Fedora, via openSUSE. Now the only strange thing around here is me. 🙃
@codewiz Spent my morning applying five non-cumulative BIOS updates thanks to you. Mini heart attacks whenever the bar stopped for a while...
@tagomago I hate those non-linear progress bars!
It's likely that Fedora installs grub in the same path used by Windows so the bios doesn't try to "help".
That's also how i fixed mine: moved grub to EFI\BOOT\BOOTX86.EFI
grub-install has a confusingly named option for this: --removable. I think it's called this way because removable drives can't take the EFI nvram vars with them, and thus the bootloader must use a path that firmware will discover automatically.
PC motherboard vendors feel compelled to add their kludgy fixes because the entire UEFI boot process is so brittle.
The blame for this whole mess falls primarily on Intel for defining the original, half-assed EFI, and later on the UEFI Forum, who took it to its present state.
The entire UEFI boot process is so brittle that PC motherboard vendors feel compelled to add their kludgy fixes to help their customers.
The blame for this big mess falls primarily on Intel for defining the original, half-assed EFI, and later on the UEFI Forum, who took it to its present state.
@codewiz There's no Windows installed on this machine, so I'm guessing it's other things. On the rare occasion that I might need Windows, I have another machine for that. I've read that others are having problems on occasion, including the Calamares installer.
@codewiz Can you post some benchmarks on openbenchmarks with your new system?
I wrote some quick reference doc for Phoronix Test Suite here: https://github.com/TechnologyClassroom/HardwareTest/issues/6#issuecomment-1066188987
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