today i'm unhappy about NixOS because: the GRUB graphical mode straight up crashes on this motherboard.
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today i'm unhappy about NixOS because: the GRUB graphical mode straight up crashes on this motherboard. not "cannot boot a kernel", not "errors out", but "crashes attempting to transition out of graphical mode to text mode" (whatever that even means with an EFI framebuffer)
I spent thirty fucking minutes trying to figure out what went wrong. the kernel boots if i extract it from the nix store and use the EFI stub. every option in the GRUB menu crashes. i had to edit it using the EFI text editor (it's a polyglot image which Linux mounts as iso9660 but EFI mounts as FAT32) to enable textmode unconditionally
(interestingly, after this every time i transition between GRUB menus it complains about "not being able to fit glyphs on screen". maybe that's what crashes it? no idea.)
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today i'm unhappy about NixOS because: the GRUB graphical mode straight up crashes on this motherboard. not "cannot boot a kernel", not "errors out", but "crashes attempting to transition out of graphical mode to text mode" (whatever that even means with an EFI framebuffer)
I spent thirty fucking minutes trying to figure out what went wrong. the kernel boots if i extract it from the nix store and use the EFI stub. every option in the GRUB menu crashes. i had to edit it using the EFI text editor (it's a polyglot image which Linux mounts as iso9660 but EFI mounts as FAT32) to enable textmode unconditionally
(interestingly, after this every time i transition between GRUB menus it complains about "not being able to fit glyphs on screen". maybe that's what crashes it? no idea.)
i don't like GRUB. i dislike GRUB to such an extent that my personal laptop boots into the EFI shell and then i manually run a .nsh script that runs my kernel (i would use EFI boot options but Dell broke command line support in EFI boot options on their laptops and haven't managed to fix it for like 5 years). at least it works every time
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i don't like GRUB. i dislike GRUB to such an extent that my personal laptop boots into the EFI shell and then i manually run a .nsh script that runs my kernel (i would use EFI boot options but Dell broke command line support in EFI boot options on their laptops and haven't managed to fix it for like 5 years). at least it works every time
@whitequark I think you could get around this by using a UKI with built-in kernel parameters inside it. It needs quite a bit of space on the ESP though due to the bundled initramfs.
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i don't like GRUB. i dislike GRUB to such an extent that my personal laptop boots into the EFI shell and then i manually run a .nsh script that runs my kernel (i would use EFI boot options but Dell broke command line support in EFI boot options on their laptops and haven't managed to fix it for like 5 years). at least it works every time
I'm quite happy with rEFInd. No idea if you'd like it though.
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@whitequark I think you could get around this by using a UKI with built-in kernel parameters inside it. It needs quite a bit of space on the ESP though due to the bundled initramfs.
@lunareclipse well i already put my initrd there so it's not a problem
what i don't want however is to rebuild my kernel just to put the cmdline in it. on an embedded target i could do this with an fdt...
what do you mean by an UKI
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today i'm unhappy about NixOS because: the GRUB graphical mode straight up crashes on this motherboard. not "cannot boot a kernel", not "errors out", but "crashes attempting to transition out of graphical mode to text mode" (whatever that even means with an EFI framebuffer)
I spent thirty fucking minutes trying to figure out what went wrong. the kernel boots if i extract it from the nix store and use the EFI stub. every option in the GRUB menu crashes. i had to edit it using the EFI text editor (it's a polyglot image which Linux mounts as iso9660 but EFI mounts as FAT32) to enable textmode unconditionally
(interestingly, after this every time i transition between GRUB menus it complains about "not being able to fit glyphs on screen". maybe that's what crashes it? no idea.)
@whitequark fwiw I have one of those chinese X99 motherboards (though not the same one you have) and NixOS boots properly using systemd-boot
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i don't like GRUB. i dislike GRUB to such an extent that my personal laptop boots into the EFI shell and then i manually run a .nsh script that runs my kernel (i would use EFI boot options but Dell broke command line support in EFI boot options on their laptops and haven't managed to fix it for like 5 years). at least it works every time
@whitequark
if all you want is simple text files storing options and a menu to select or edit it before boot then I suggest you look at systemd-boot -
i don't like GRUB. i dislike GRUB to such an extent that my personal laptop boots into the EFI shell and then i manually run a .nsh script that runs my kernel (i would use EFI boot options but Dell broke command line support in EFI boot options on their laptops and haven't managed to fix it for like 5 years). at least it works every time
@whitequark I'm using Syslinux whenever possible, because while it has its own problems (make sure CONFIG_EFI_HANDOVER_PROTOCOL is enabled, unless you like working with 2 GB RAM total), it still seems to work more reliably than grub.
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