Boot entry not showing up.

[Joker9944]

Hello there!

I followed the quick start guide, the required EFI files are generated in the boot partition and show up as singed with sudo sbctl verify. But on reboot no boot entries for NixOS show up in the UEFI boot menu, requiring installing a different bootloader from a recovery image to get the system to boot again.

What can I provide to help find the root cause of this issue?

[ElvishJerricco]

I believe lanzaboote doesn't currently do a bootctl install or anything like that and assumes you're upgrading from an existing nixos / systemd-boot config that already set the UEFI entry. You should be able to bootctl install to get the UEFI entry and rebuild to have lanzaboote replace it with a signed version.

[Joker9944]

@ElvishJerricco Thanks for the quick answer. As far as I know lanzaboote utilities bootspec which should take care of UEFI entry generation, which I can see in the boot partition.

Anyways tried to first setup systemd-boot and upgrade to lanzaboote from there with the same result sadly.

[Momi-V]

Did you run a full nixos-rebuild switch --install-bootloader after including lanzaboote in your configuration.nix?

[JasperSurmont]

I have been experiencing a similar issue. Every now and again my boot entry just dissapears and I have to go into a Live USB to fix it. Doing a nixos-rebuild switch --install bootloader doesn't actually install the bootloader, I have to bootctl install it again.

[Momi-V]

Most UEFI systems have a "boot from file" option where you can just select the right .efi file to boot manually (even if it doesn't have an entry), then run bootctl install + rebuild --install-bootloader on your system.

rebuild --install-bootloader does install the bootloader, but apparently doesn't add it as an nvram entry to the UEFI boot selection options.

It's only a workaround and it'd be nice if the entry didn't disappear, but I've only seen it happen on specific devices (with lackluster firmware). My desktop has kept its entry for over a year and multiple updates (both NixOS and UEFI)