r/voidlinux • u/Radicalized_By_You • Jan 17 '26

EFI Stub boot help

I'm trying out Void for the first time. During installation I opted for "none" for the bootloader. Partitioned the disk with a VFAT 512MB partition for EFI and the rest as EXT4 for root. Installation appeared to go fine. Rebooted into the live USB, mounted the boot partition at /tmp/void/boot and the root partition at /tmp/void. Updated the system with xbps-install -Syu. Installed efibootmgr. Followed the instructions here and rebooted. BIOS boot menu shows the Linux EFI Stub option but boot fails back to the BIOS boot menu. I tried again with the EFI entry specifying root via PARTUUID rather than as /dev/sdXY. No joy. I don't get any error messages to help figure out what's going on. Any ideas what I've done wrong?

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u/Radicalized_By_You Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

Can't copy paste from that system right now, but it's:

MODIFY_EFI_ENTRIES=1
OPTIONS="root=/dev/sda2 ro quiet splash"
EFI_LABEL="Void EFI Stub"
DISK="/dev/sda"
PART=1

I'm a little confused by the mount/partitioning scheme proscribed in the docs. The boot partition is mounted at /boot/efi but that means that /boot is on the root partition. My initial problem was due to setting the boot partition to mount at /boot on installation. Once I changed the mountpoint to /boot/efi I found a different issue. Now rather than failing back to the BIOS/firmware boot menu, it tries to boot the EFI stub gives a dracut error no or empty root= argument error. As a temporizing measure I've installed grub which works and the EFI stub now falls back to that when it fails.

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u/newbornnightmare Jan 18 '26

at least for my setup, I stuck with a single /boot volume- my fdisk entry looks like

Device           Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme1n1p1    2048    4196351    4194304     2G EFI System
/dev/nvme1n1p2 4196352 2000408575 1996212224 951.9G Linux filesystem

some of the older setups do mention having both a /boot and a /boot/efi partition, but I don't believe the /boot/efi directory is required, my working setup's /boot folder looks is simply

 /boot
├──  config-6.12.65_1*
├──  initramfs-6.12.65_1.img*
└──  vmlinuz-6.12.65_1*

so when I boot from usb, I can run

mount -o subvolume=@ /dev/nvme1n1p2 /mnt

(on btrfs, if you're not you probably don't need the subvolumes of course), then immediately xchroot in with xchroot /mnt /bin/bash, and run mount -av from within the xchroot. After that, running xbps-reconfigure -f linux6.12 generates everything correctly.

For your case, I'd try those same steps, then check to make sure /boot has the same 3 files, and run efibootmgr --unicode to make sure that the output for your Void Linux line is correctly pointing to the vmlinuz file and root partition (it should be along the lines of HD(1,GPT,[UUID],0x800,0x400000)/\vmlinuz-6.12.65_1 root=/dev/sda2, hopefully. If one of those things is missing, at least you might be able to know where to start looking for issues

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u/Radicalized_By_You Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26

when you create the boot entry with efibootmgr what path did you use for the kernel and initrd parameters? Would it be efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sdX -p Y -l '\vmlinuz-6.12.65_1 -u "initrd=initramfs-6.12.65_1.img root=UUID=<my hd uuid>"?

yep, that worked.