• Installer message about EFI

    From Gregor Riepl@21:1/5 to All on Sun Feb 12 23:10:01 2023
    Hi,

    I recently acquired an old Sun Fire V215, which I intend to use for
    Debian experimentation.

    Found a minor oddity in the current Debian installer.
    During GRUB installation, it presents the standard message:

    It seems that this computer is configured to boot via EFI, but maybe
    that configuration will not work for booting from the hard drive.
    Some EFI firmware implementations do not meet the EFI specification
    (i.e. they are buggy!) and do not support proper configuration of
    boot options from system hard drives.

    That doesn't make much sense with grub-iee1275 and OBP, it should
    probably be removed in this configuration.

    I also found that the installer had trouble setting up the apt sources
    later in the installation process, and only the "standard utilities"
    task was available. sudo and SSH were missing afterwards, requiring
    manual fixing through rescue mode.

    It looks like this was the root of the problem:

    The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG B523E5F3FC4E5F2C
    Debian Port: NO_PUBKEY 8D69674688B6CB36 be verified because the
    public key is not available:

    debian-ports-archive-keyring 2022.02.15 was installed from the CD, but I
    can see that there's a newer version available (2023.02.01). After
    installing this package manually, apt started working again.

    I also found that the smp kernel is very unstable on this box, had
    kernel panics all over the place. What exactly is the deal here? Why
    would the SMP kernel (or the whole system on multiple CPUs) be so much
    less stable? Could it be a hardware defect?

    In any case, I've got a working machine now.

    kudos,
    Gregor

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