Arch Linux

dr1fter

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2022-01-21

Posts: 51

garbled efiboot-entries

Some time ago, my efiboot-entries are no longer properly displayed when runing `efibootmgr`. The name, partition, and path to initrd are displayed fine. The remainder is just a sequence of hexadecimal numbers.

Example:

Boot0000* Arch (corsair)	HD(1,GPT,32c76a12-78d9-4c54-8a13-035c22027e5d,0x800,0x100000)/\VMLINUZ-LINUX72006f006f0074003d0055005500490044003d00300036006600630062003100330064002d0061003700610032002d0034003800630038002d0062003500660032002d00320066003000350039003000350062006400370063003700200072007700200069006e0069007400720064003d005c0069006e0069007400720061006d00660073002d006c0069006e00750078002e0069006d006700

After adding a new entry, _all_ entries (also those that existed prior to inserting a new one) are displayed properly again. Until next reboot.

For example, after having added a new entry, the same entry from above reads like so:

Boot0000* Arch (corsair)	HD(1,GPT,32c76a12-78d9-4c54-8a13-035c22027e5d,0x800,0x100000)/\VMLINUZ-LINUXroot=UUID=06fcb13d-a7a2-48c8-b5f2-2f05905bd7c7 rw initrd=\initramfs-linux.img

I did not enter the path to vmlinux-linux in uppercase, though. For the new entry I just added for testing, the case was not converted, interestingly, so adding a new entry seems to only partially restore accurate displaying of existing entries. After removing the (new) entry again, all entries are being displayed garbled again (even without reboot).

Edit: I inspected the output some more, and it would appear that it is the hex-str-representation of 4byte-unicode, where each first two bytes are the original character, always followed by a zero-byte (0x00). I could restore the original value using a short script. So in effect, this somewhat suggests me this might be a bug w/ efibootmgr.

Edit2: there seems to be a bugreport already: https://github.com/rhboot/efibootmgr/issues/195

Last edited by dr1fter (2025-07-19 17:19:01)