Gummibootx64.efi won't boot

Question

I've been using gummiboot successfully on a number of systems (e.g. as in this example), but recently ran into a problem on a supermicro server with an SSD boot drive.  The installation goes smoothly, and the boot entry shows up in the system's firmware, but the system always boots into an interface allowing me to choose either booting the UEFI shell or into the firmware; i.e. it's not actually booting.  I confirmed this by booting into the system UEFI shell and running gummibootx64.efi by hand:
boot into UEFI shell
mark -r to identify all potential boot devices (in this case fs0)
fs0:
cd EFI
cd gummiboot
gummibootx64.efi
takes me to what is basically a firmware prompt.  My guess is this might have something to do with the entry files in /boot/loader/entries, and points to my confusion about how gummiboot actually uses these files.  So far I've just made such a file; e.g.
[root@ibis entries]# cat arch1.conf
title Arch Linux1
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=/dev/sdc3 rw ipv6.disable=1
and it's worked.  Now that it's not working, I'm not sure how to debug this, given that I don't understand exactly how gummiboot decides which one of these to use if there are several (in this particular case, though, I only have one and it's still not working).
I am able to UEFI boot from a USB Arch installer device, so UEFI booting is working in general.
Any thoughts on how to debug this?

Answer 1

pgoetz wrote:I'm not quite sure what you mean by "is /boot (along with the kernel image & initramfs) mounted at the EFI system partition?"
When you were installing the system, did you run these commands:
# mount /dev/sd<x><a> /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/sd<x><b> /mnt/boot
Where <x>=target drive letter and <a>&<b>=root & EFI system partition numbers.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … partitions
If you chroot into your unbootable system, you can see the mountpoints using:
lsblk -f
My output for this gives:
empty@Arch ~ % lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT
sda
├─sda1 vfat 9669-102D /boot
├─sda2 ext4 dc7b15ff-6725-4918-b0fd-4bfcc5560ffa /
├─sda3
├─sda4 ext4 Debian 191c641f-66ed-47fc-9adb-df2b189ed367 /debian
└─sda5 swap 7fac1c92-59df-40c9-b602-49cba7b5110d [SWAP]
As you can see /boot has the EFI system partition (sda1) as the mountpoint
With gummiboot, only files in the ESP can be parsed.