System set up, but no UEFI entry

[clawoflight]

Hi, I ran the setup and it seemed to work fine, but I cannot find any UEFI entry.
ZFS and md raid partitions are there (visible in lsblk and zpool import)
This is a 2-disk mirror, 24.04.

How can I proceed with finding out what went wrong and getting refind+zfsbootmenu set up?

[Halfwalker]

Assuming this was on physical HW ? Does it boot into refind ? If not, just booting into the uefi shell, you can check with

fs0:
dir

refind is installed in EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi so you could try running it directly from the shell

fs0:
EFI/refind/refind_x64.efi

You can also boot the livecd again and verify the mdadm efi raid

cat /proc/mdstat

See if you can mount the /boot/efi raid - that should be listed in the /etc/fstab file. Then you can verify that the refind contents look sane.

If it does boot into refind, do you not see an entry for zfsbootmenu ?

I should add to the docs a bit - stress using the -d param and copying the ZFS-setup.log file off somewhere else so you can peruse and look for errors.

If you install again, you can edit the ZFS-root.sh script to add a pause right after the refind install (around line 1290 put in a read -r -p "pausing after refind"). Then you can open another terminal (alt-f2) and poke around to be sure things look right.

If you have another system with Virtualbox or vmware or whatnot, you can do a test install there with 2 disks.

[clawoflight]

Thanks for replying so quickly!
Yes, this is physical hardware. My first asrock rack board, maybe I'm just not used to the enterprise grade stuff. But IMPI makes debugging this relatively painless, even if the UEFI is a bit slow :D

Further analysis:

• /boot/efi looks good
• when trying to get into EFI shell, I got refind - which then started zfsbootmenu correctly
• that got me into a working system

After switching the first boot entry from "HDD" to "UEFI Application --> builtin EFI Shell", it boots me into the UEFI setup.
It doesn't let me select another UEFI application.

--> I must be missing something obvious here :'D Only one piece is missing though?

[Halfwalker]

OK, that sounds like it all installed fine. It's something with the uefi setup on that motherboard I think. Usually selecting the HDD is enough - it looks for an efi boot partition and away it goes. My workstation here (Asus B450 board) sees all the efi images (refind, zfsbootmenu efi image, etc.) in the boot partition and I can pick any of them to boot.

There should be a /boot/efi/startup.nsh in /boot/efi - that's kind of a fallback for the shell, it will run that, which should start up refind. In general uefi is quite varied, especially among older motherboards. There will be some magic incantation that will get it to boot refind :P

[clawoflight]

Thanks for the hint!
I booted into the system manually and saw that efibootmgr didn't show refind at all.
I re-ran refind-install and got the following error (which is a warning, and so didn't cause your script to report a failure):

Could not identify ESP in AddBootEntry()!

So I manually added the entry and it works fine now:

sudo efibootmgr -c -l "\EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi" -L rEFInd

Now I have just one more pedantic question - this added an entry for one of my drives:

Boot0000* rEFInd HD(1,GPT,4b52e571-477e-453d-9eb8-d52e21aa2496,0x800,0x1f4000)/File(\EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi)

Since that partition is raid1 and root is zfs, I should be able to boot correctly with just one disk inserted (not that I would want to).
Is there an easy way to register refind on the second partition? Or should I just shut down, yank that drive, manually boot and add a second boot entry from the one-disk system? :D

Anyway, thanks a lot for this! I found and bookmarked this half a year ago when planning this build, and I was very impressed.
Clean bash with HEREDOCs and obvious shellcheck usage, nicely structured and readable, obviously designed with automated provisioning in mind - you made me decide that zfs on root is feasible right then and there!

I edited the script to change the timezone (- maybe you could prompt for that too?), and to try out how zstd compression feels. Other than that I only needed to read it to trust it, not modify anything.

Thank you very much for this project!

[Halfwalker]

Hrm ... When refind installs itself, since the EFI partitions are mirrored it should install to both disks. I tested booting to a multi-disk setup with one or more disks missing, and it all worked. Adding the missing disks back worked too - mdadm just rebuilt them.

You don't even truly need refind - could just have efibootmgr point directly to zfsbootmenu. You lose the memcheck and other bootable bits though.

I haven't seen that refind-install error before, so it sounds like something about your setup is a little unique ? I wonder if there's a way to check the uefi boot setup to see if a manual intervention step like you did is needed. If you're not pressed for time and needing the system up right away, it might be useful to do a reinstall with the -d param. When finished, scp the ZFS-setup.log file off somewhere to look through.

I'll look at making TZ a parameter, though that might be a bit tricky. Need both the timezone definition text (America/New_York) as well as linking the correct /usr/share/zoneinfo/<blah> into /etc/localtime

I'm glad this got you to root-on-zfs :) I am a HUGE proponent of that, and the combination with zfsbootmenu just makes things work so nicely. No grubby grub crap to deal with.

[clawoflight]

I don't think my system is special, but this is my first server-grade board. The 2 main lessons I took from my last build were that I really want ZFS on root if possible (the data already was), and IPMI. The latter already came in handy.

I don't think there is ever a reason to use anything different for /etc/localtime. In other words, <blah> should just be $TZ.

Yeah, I love it!