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| author | Roman Riabenko <roman@riabenko.com> | 2025-01-28 13:50:29 -0500 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> | 2025-02-03 16:21:21 -0500 |
| commit | 616ae36e0f557cecb4abe58c5b0973b9428d25e0 (patch) | |
| tree | d762ea35cee9962eed63c7bb1108fc8471411985 | |
| parent | f40eff02413c20cdb6200d90cbb7f674cea475fd (diff) | |
| download | guix-616ae36e0f557cecb4abe58c5b0973b9428d25e0.tar.gz guix-616ae36e0f557cecb4abe58c5b0973b9428d25e0.zip | |
gnu: system: Disable EFI pstore backend by default
Disabling the EFI pstore backend is expected to reduce the chances of unaware
users running into issues with UEFI and failing to boot their Guix Systems.
This commit disables one of the backends for the persistent storage driver
'pstore' in the Linux kernel. In particular, we disable the backend which stores
the data in EFI variable storage in UEFI NVRAM.
More information about the pstore system:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/ABI/testing/pstore
https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/pstore-blk.html
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/pstore-linux-kernel-persistent-storage-file-system
This change reduces writes to UEFI to reduce the chances of it wearing out or
malfunctioning for other reasons, with the goal of preventing situations where
the EFI variable storage is full and cannot take new variables. This is known to
cause "Could not prepare Boot variable: No space left on device" errors on
computers with some UEFI implementations which are susceptible to such problems,
typically on relatively older machines. The user is confronted by the issue at
the later stages of Guix system reconfiguration, when the new boot entry is
created. It may be difficult to recover from because the exact cause depends on
UEFI. Sometimes it is enough to remove dumps from efivars, but sometimes the
storage will remain full permanently with no way to reclaim space.
Users may still enable the backend by changing the option via the kernel
command-line arguments, either in the Guix system configuration or in GRUB.
The above is my summary of what was previously discussed in guix-help mailing
list: <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2025-01/msg00173.html>.
* gnu/packages/linux.scm (default-extra-linux-options): Enable the kernel
build-time configuration option CONFIG_EFI_VARS_PSTORE_DEFAULT_DISABLE.
Change-Id: Id0294fa90ccbf3bacbb55a22aeb4f0a863efe22c
Co-authored-by: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
| -rw-r--r-- | gnu/packages/linux.scm | 6 |
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/gnu/packages/linux.scm b/gnu/packages/linux.scm index 308583f54d..4d5988ab97 100644 --- a/gnu/packages/linux.scm +++ b/gnu/packages/linux.scm @@ -920,7 +920,11 @@ ARCH and optionally VARIANT, or #f if there is no such configuration." ("CONFIG_VIRTIO_MMIO" . m) ("CONFIG_FUSE_FS" . m) ("CONFIG_CIFS" . m) - ("CONFIG_9P_FS" . m))) + ("CONFIG_9P_FS" . m) + ;; Disable the EFI pstore storage backend to avoid causing + ;; unrecoverable failures on some EFI systems: + ;; https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2025-01/msg00173.html + ("CONFIG_EFI_VARS_PSTORE_DEFAULT_DISABLE" . #t))) (define (config->string options) (string-join (map (match-lambda |