Re: [gentoo-user] SOLVED: NVMe drive and grub

[Marc Joliet]

(I've got a bad habit of saving unfinished emails in the drafts folder and 
then forgetting about them.  I found this one while cleaning it up and thought 
it might still be informative.)

On Tuesday 12 April 2016 10:56:56 Adam Carter wrote:
>> The problem was sys-boot/grub-2.02_beta2-r9, which UEFI never ran.
>>
>> The fix was to get rid of grub altogether and instead use
>> sys-boot/gummiboot.
>> Not only was it fully functional, it was a welcome relief not to have to
>> grapple with grub's baroque complexity and to be able to return to the
>> simple
>> booting I remember from years ago.
>>
>> I'd spent five long days wrestling with grub, going round in circles and
>> getting nowhere, before I was pointed to gummiboot.
>
>I also failed to get grub2 + UEFI working. So either;
>1. We're both dummies
>2. The handbook instructions are incorrect and/or inadequate
>
>Can anyone else that is familiar comment on the grub2 + UEFI doc quality?

Poison already gave a more informative reply than I could have , but just to 
give a data point: I have successfully installed GRUB on an old Mac Mini from 
2007 (obtained from a friend).  The main hiccup was that I couldn't get any 
live CDs to boot in EFI mode, so I resorted to grub2-mkimage in order to 
"bootstrap" booting in EFI mode.  Once that was resolved, grub2-install worked 
just fine, as long as I passed --efi-directory=/boot/efi.  I have yet to test 
whether I can boot directly with GRUB or still need refind.

(I was being stubborn and wanted to run what I found out after the fact is 
referred to as mixed mode, which allows a 64 bit kernel to access a 32 bit 
EFI, in which case you *need* a boot loader like GRUB.  BTW, another thing I 
found out afterwards is that Debian apparently has mixed-mode live media 
starting with the Jessie release.)

HTH
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup