Before this commit there was no way to access (boot into) specialisation of previous generations from grub,even tho they are there.
This commit will add grub submenu for each generation if the generation has any specialisation.
Which will allow you to boot into them.
Co-authored-by: Samuel Dionne-Riel <samuel@dionne-riel.com>
There is only other `with` with a somewhat broad scope, `with pkgs`, but
it's used in a place where it would become awkward to change out. And
anyway its scope is rather limited still.
With a limited testing of all packaged GRUB 2 themes (pkgs.nixos-grub2-theme)
this is tested to work.
Without this change, the theme loading will error out (waiting for a key press).
With this change, the theme loads and works as expected.
The intent was to not pass the flag when installing as removable. In
reality there is a third case, where you may not want to touch EFI
variables, and not want to install as removable.
In that case, it would install to the generic \EFI\grub\grubx64.efi,
which is not a good choice in any cases. The operating system should
"own" their path under \EFI\ to be a good citizen [citation needed].
With this change, there can be only two paths GRUB can be installed to:
- \EFI\NixOS-boot\grubx64.efi
- \EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi
This removes the surprising behaviour where GRUB may be installed to a
different location only because we configured NixOS not to touch EFI
variables.
It may be necessary under some configurations to install GRUB without
touching EFI variables, but to the NixOS-owned location.
Without this change, GRUB installation on non-PC systems (such as
aarch64-linux) only works if boot.loader.grub.devices is set to exactly
`["nodev"]`. If boot.loader.grub.devices was any other value (including
the default `[]`), users got the error:
Died at /nix/store/an9ngv2vg95bdcy0ifsxlbkasprm4dcw-install-grub.pl line 586.
install-grub.pl verifies that if both $grub and $grubEfi are set, then
$grubTarget (e.g. i386-pc) and $grubTargetEfi (e.g. x86_64-efi) must
both be set, or the script will `die`. On non-PC systems, $grubTarget
is "".
When boot.loader.grub.devices is ["nodev"], $grub is set to null,
disabling non-EFI installation. But if a user has devices set for an
x86_64 config, or is using only mirroredBoots without setting devices,
they will hit this `die`.
This change sets $grub to "" if $grubTarget is "".
Previously, secrets were named according to the initrd they were
associated with. This created a problem: If secrets were changed whilst
the initrd remained the same, there were two versions of the secrets
with one initrd. The result was that only one version of the secrets would
by recorded into the /boot partition and get used. AFAICT this would
only be the oldest version of the secrets for the given initrd version.
This manifests as #114594, which I found frustrating while trying to use
initrd secrets for the first time. While developing the secrets I found
I could not get new versions of the secrets to take effect.
Additionally, it's a nasty issue to run into if you had cause to change
the initrd secrets for credential rotation, etc, if you change them and
discover you cannot, or alternatively that you can't roll back as you
would expect.
Additional changes in this patch.
* Add a regression test that switching to another grub configuration
with the alternate secrets works. This test relies on the fact that it
is not changing the initrd. I have checked that the test fails if I
undo my change.
* Persist the useBootLoader disk state, similarly to other boot state.
* I had to do this, otherwise I could not find a route to testing the
alternate boot configuration. I did attempt a few different ways of
testing this, including directly running install-grub.pl, but what
I've settled on is most like what a user would do and avoids
depending on lots of internal details.
* Making tests that test the boot are a bit tricky (see hibernate.nix
and installer.nix for inspiration), I found that in addition to
having to copy quite a bit of code I still couldn't get things to
work as desired since the bootloader state was being clobbered.
My change to persist the useBootLoader state could break things,
conceptually. I need some help here discovering if that is the case,
possibly by letting this run through a staging CI if there is one.
Fix#114594.
cc potential reviewers:
@lopsided98 (original implementer) @joachifm (original reviewer),
@wkennington (numerous fixes to grub-install.pl), @lheckemann (wrote
original secrets test).
The build of initrd-secrets can routinely fail for old boot entries
if the secrets have been removed or renamed in a later generation.
This always happens for generation 1, because it's built from the
NixOS installer and the paths differs by the mount point (i.e. /mnt).
The error is very confusing because it fails to mention it's about
an older generation and that it's somewhat harmless.
This commit turns the error into a warning for all generations but the
current, adds the name of the failed entry to the message and a note
explaining why it can happen.
mostly no rendering changes. some lists (like simplelist) don't have an
exact translation to markdown, so we use a comma-separated list of
literals instead.
our xslt already replaces double line breaks with a paragraph close and
reopen. not using explicit para tags lets nix-doc-munge convert more
descriptions losslessly.
only whitespace changes to generated documents, except for two
strongswan options gaining paragraph two breaks they arguably should've
had anyway.
the conversion procedure is simple:
- find all things that look like options, ie calls to either `mkOption`
or `lib.mkOption` that take an attrset. remember the attrset as the
option
- for all options, find a `description` attribute who's value is not a
call to `mdDoc` or `lib.mdDoc`
- textually convert the entire value of the attribute to MD with a few
simple regexes (the set from mdize-module.sh)
- if the change produced a change in the manual output, discard
- if the change kept the manual unchanged, add some text to the
description to make sure we've actually found an option. if the
manual changes this time, keep the converted description
this procedure converts 80% of nixos options to markdown. around 2000
options remain to be inspected, but most of those fail the "does not
change the manual output check": currently the MD conversion process
does not faithfully convert docbook tags like <code> and <package>, so
any option using such tags will not be converted at all.
Since 03eaa48 added perl.withPackages, there is a canonical way to
create a perl interpreter from a list of libraries, for use in script
shebangs or generic build inputs. This method is declarative (what we
are doing is clear), produces short shebangs[1] and needs not to wrap
existing scripts.
Unfortunately there are a few exceptions that I've found:
1. Scripts that are calling perl with the -T switch. This makes perl
ignore PERL5LIB, which is what perl.withPackages is using to inform
the interpreter of the library paths.
2. Perl packages that depends on libraries in their own path. This
is not possible because perl.withPackages works at build time. The
workaround is to add `-I $out/${perl.libPrefix}` to the shebang.
In all other cases I propose to switch to perl.withPackages.
[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/779997/
It was introduced in c10fe14 but removed in c4f910f.
It remained such that people with older generations in their boot
entries could still boot those. Given that the parameter hasn't had any
use in quite some years, it seems safe to remove now.
Fixes#60184
For UEFI setups, "device" will generally be the special value "nodev"
which represents not running grub-install at all. Using "nodev" for
boot mirrors should therefore be allowed.
Fixes error
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /nix/store/...-install-grub.pl line 642, <FILE> line 5.
with `/boot/grub/state` being:
```
grub
2.04
no
/dev/sda
/boot
```
I am not sure where the trailing empty line can come from; the script does not
seem to write it. In any case, now we handle that situation as well.
Further, ensure that `extraGrubInstallArgs` defaults to the empty array
if its key is not present in the `jsonState`.
For example, turns the error
cannot copy /nix/store/g24xsmmsz46hzi6whv7qwwn17myn3jfq-grub-2.04/share/grub/unicode.pf2 to /boot
into the more useful
cannot copy /nix/store/g24xsmmsz46hzi6whv7qwwn17myn3jfq-grub-2.04/share/grub/unicode.pf2 to /boot: Read-only file system
