Arch Linux

gilbs

Member

Registered: 2016-12-28

Posts: 11

Re: Kernel panic when booting with EFISTUB

I finally managed to workaround the issue and use EFISTUB directly on my XPS 9370 and XPS 9550. They were both affected by the exact same issue (Dell's buggy UEFI not passing command line arguments). The solution is to bundle kernel, command line arguments and other stuff into one EFI boot image, using systemd-boot's EFI stub. The procedure is roughly described in Systemd-boot documentation and isn't too hard to setup.

For simple use cases, it might be more convenient to use a boot manager such as systemd-boot because it just works out of the box. But the bundling procedure also enables you to activate secure boot, which I did successfully and you might find useful. Besides, sbupdate automates all the bundling and signing stuff, which is handy.

Hope this helps. Have fun.

julienfalque

Member

Registered: 2016-06-17

Posts: 46

Re: Kernel panic when booting with EFISTUB

Maybe compiling a custom kernel with required parameters might work, I'll give it a try.

In the meantime I noticed the startup.nsh section of the EFISTUB page of the wiki, anyone knows whether Dell's UEFI implementation (really) supports this?

JoshuaRLi

Member

Registered: 2018-02-04

Posts: 5

Website

Re: Kernel panic when booting with EFISTUB

I'm afraid you may not be able to get this working at all unless Dell brings out an update to the UEFI firmware (or you try to go a coreboot route maybe?).
The UEFI implementation of the Dell XPS models is basically broken; any arguments you set on a bootentry (efibootmgr's -u/--unicode) will be ignored. As a result you will have a boot entry for it but no data will ever be passed to the loader so it will never know your initrd or any other settings.

This is why most bootloaders work fine; they are just programs run without any arguments that chainload the appropriate item using their own configuration method (thus bypassing the broken UEFI implementation).

EDIT: Sadly there is no general Dell XPS page containing this information. It's currently only mentioned on the wiki under certain models (e.g. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/De … _not_boot) while, as far as I'm aware, every model so far is affected by this.

I've got a Dell XPS 13 9343 and ran into this exact issue. Found this thread, can confirm that my current UEFI firmware ignores kernel params in bootentry args. There are workarounds as mentioned above me, but for me booting to rEFInd then using that to load an EFISTUB kernel is satisfactory.

Last edited by JoshuaRLi (2018-05-09 04:01:35)

winnetou

Member

Registered: 2018-05-04

Posts: 7

Re: Kernel panic when booting with EFISTUB

I had a similar issue recently, when trying to boot a custom signed.efi bundle of my kernel and the initramfs and boot parameters.

All I can say:
Grub and rEFInd both ignore bundled boot parameters (at least with secure boot enabled)

See this post :
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=236798

Kakashiy

Member

Registered: 2018-01-31

Posts: 13

Re: Kernel panic when booting with EFISTUB

I've got the same error so I googled a bit and wrote that: https://github.com/Kakashiiiiy/EFISTUB/ it should compile with gnu-efi-libs installed.
Just adjust the Kernel Command line and copy the efistub.efi file to your ESP partition. Then create an entry with efibootmgr for example

efibootmgr --disk /dev/nvme0n1p1 --part 1 --create --label "Arch Linux" --loader /efistub.efi

It should work now like normal EFISTUB

In the future I may create an aur package to make it simpler to install.
I've also seen the systemd-boot alternative, but instead you can just install systemd-boot with 1 entry and loader.conf timeout 0

Last edited by Kakashiy (2019-09-20 16:57:44)

2ManyDogs

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 4,645

Re: Kernel panic when booting with EFISTUB

Closing this old topic.