Migrating Fedora from BIOS to UEFI

devops

Let me tell you a story.

This is not a sad story, but a geeky one.

A story about a developer that was told it’s impossible to migrate his Fedora OS from BIOS to UEFI, and against all odds, succeeded.

A few months ago I started working at a new place and got a shiny Dell XPS 9560.

The spec was amazing: Top of the line CPU, GPU, 4k screen and even 32gb of RAM!

But the issues.. oh… the issues. Thank god most of them are solvable by a simple firmare upgrade. The rest are GPU issues which led me to disable the embedded NVIDIA GPU (which I don’t need anyway).

Ok, so how do I upgrade the firmware? fwupd comes to the rescue:

“fwupd is an open source daemon for managing the installation of firmware updates on Linux-based systems, developed by GNOME maintainer Richard Hughes…” - Wikipedia.

I was a few keystrokes away from getting all my issues solved!
Dell put in a lot of effort to make sure fwupd works great with their products, So I wasn’t suprised that my laptop is supported.

$ fwupdmgr refresh
$ fwupdmgr update
No devices can be updated: Nothing to do

$ fwupdate --supported
Firmware updates are not supported on this machine.

What?! but why?! fwupdmgr recognizes my devices:

$ fwupdmgr get-devices
Intel AMT (unprovisioned)
...

XPS 15 9560 System Firmware
...

Integrated Webcam HD
...

GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile]
...

So what’s wrong? I’m connected to AC, I’m running as root, I got UEFI Capsule Updates turned on.

Oh wait. I’m not using UEFI. No problem! let’s migrate!

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/f26/install-guide/install/Booting_the_Installation.html

My first thought: “Oh shit. I’m f\cked”*. My second thought: “that doesn’t make any sense!.

Game Plan

All I need is a simple grub-mkconfig while booted in UEFI mode, but how?

  1. Convert my paritition table to GUID Partition Table
  2. Free up some space for an EFI Partition /boot/efi paritition
  3. Update GRUB to use UEFI

Before we continue, I want to share we you my own partition table:

Disk /dev/sda: 953.9 GiB, 1024209543168 bytes, 2000409264 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos

Device              Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048    1953791    1951744   953M Linux filesystem
/dev/sda2    1953792   60549119   58595328    28G Linux swap
/dev/sda3   60549120  493574143  433025024 206.5G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda4 493574144 1669111807 1175537664 560.6G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda5 1669111808 2000203775  331091968 157.9G Linux filesystem

I have two OS’s installed. Arch & Fedora -

  • Arch: /boot is mounted at /dev/sda1 and / is mounted at /dev/sda3.
  • Fedora: / is mounted at /dev/sda4.

Both use /dev/sda2 for swap, and /dev/sda5 has some other data.
I don’t need Arch anymore, and would like to migrate Fedora to UEFI.

LiveUSB

I know that most of the changes I had to do couldn’t be done on mounted volumes, ,so I had to use a LiveCD. But nobody uses LiveCD’s nowadays - LiveUSB is the word on the streets.

I had two options. Either Download a LiveCD and burn it, or use Fedora Media Writer.

Booting into UEFI mode

First of all - I changed my BIOS configuration to boot up in UEFI mode.
Then, because I’m paranoid, I checked that I’m actually booted up in EFI mode:

$ sudo efibootmgr
EFI variables are not supported on this system.

Damn! that meant I wasn’t loaded into EFI, but I was ??

$ sudo modprobe efivarfs
$ sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0013
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000  Fedora

Bam!

Convert parition table to GPT

I got the LiveUSB installed on a company thumb drive. Now I need to convert my paritition table from dos to GUID (GPT).

This step is rather simple. I Used gdisk:

# shouldn't require a password
$ su
$ gdisk /dev/your/device
# gdisk will now prompt that it wants to convert the partition table.
# press 'w' to save and you're done.

Free up space

I actually had another OS installed at the beginning of the partition table which I didn’t use anymore, so I just deleted it and recreated the EFI parition there.

If you don’t have one, install GParted and use it to free up ~500mb.

A few notes:

  • The EFI boot parition can be shared between OS’s. if you have one for Windows, no need to create another one.
  • The parition location isn’t important - it doesn’t have to reside in the beginning of the block for instance.
  • A parition size of ~500mb should suffice.

Update GRUB

Recap

I’ve got a new GPT partition table with an EFI partition at the beginning:

Disk /dev/sda: 953.9 GiB, 1024209543168 bytes, 2000409264 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt

Device              Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda6       2048    1953791    1951744   953M EFI System
/dev/sda7    1953792   60549119   58595328    28G Linux swap
/dev/sda4   60549120 1669111807 1175537664 413.1G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda5 1669111808 2000203775  331091968 157.9G Linux filesystem

chroot

I need Fedora to mount /boot/efi on boot, and configured to use UEFI. chroot to the rescue!

For those of you that have never heard of change root, Wikipedia provides a good explanation:

Chroot is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and their children.

A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot access files and commands outside that environmental directory tree. This modified environment is called a chroot jail.

So back to where we were… Let’s chroot and get this over with.

# just login as root
$ sudo su
# mounting  everything
$ mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/fedora
$ mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/fedora/boot/efi
$ mount -t proc proc /mnt/fedora/proc/
$ mount --rbind /sys /mnt/fedora/sys/
$ mount -t efivarfs efivarfs /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
$ mount --rbind /dev /mnt/fedora/dev/
$ mount --rbind /var /mnt/fedora/var/

# copying over the efi mount point
# you might want to comment-out any /boot mounts you might have
# this step is crucial, because we need an fstab entry for the efi partition.
$ grep "/boot/efi" /etc/fstab >> /mnt/fedora/etc/fstab

# chroot into your system
$ chroot /mnt/fedora /bin/bash

Awesome. I’m in my Fedora. Now I need to follow Fedora’s Updating GRUB 2 configuration on UEFI systems.

TL;DR:

Oh wait! My paranoid self keeps asking to check that I have an fstab entry
for the efi partition. Let’s give him some peace:

$ grep "/boot/efi" /etc/fstab

Good catch! I forgot to add it previously. Let’s add it:

$ echo "/dev/sda6 /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 1" >> /etc/fstab

TL;DR #2:

$ sudo dnf reinstall grub2-efi grub2-efi-modules shim
$ sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

It worked! grub2-mkconfig told me it found Fedora!

If it didn’t, I could’ve done this step manually:

$ sudo efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/sda --part 6 --loader /EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi --label "Fedora"

Checking that it all works

I know it sounds stupid, because the OS already booted, but why not?

$ ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars | wc -l
81

$ efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0007
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0007
Boot0000* Windows Boot Manager
Boot0006* Linux-Firmware-Updater \fwupx64.efi
Boot0007* Fedora

See? that wasn’t too hard!

Upgrading Firmware

After I did all that, I reran fwupd:

$ fwupdate --supported
Firmware updates are supported on this machine.

Yay!

$ fwupdmgr refresh
$ fwupdmgr update
...
$ reboot

Done. By the way, ALL the issues I previously had were gone after upgrading!