Bug 2135923

Summary:	BOOTX64.EFI cannot boot
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Michael Riss <Michael.Riss>
Component:	shim	Assignee:	Peter Jones <pjones>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	37	CC:	fmartine, gloriouseggroll, mjg59, pjones, rharwood
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	---
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2023-07-24 13:23:02 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Michael Riss 2022-10-18 19:27:18 UTC

Description of problem:
Trying to boot Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-37-20221017.n.0.iso on my machine fails with

Invalid image
Failed to read header: Unsupported
Failed to load header: Unsupported
start_image() returned Unsupported

This behavior has already been reported here: 
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/f37-invalid-image-error-while-booting/26632
and the solution (renaming the grub*.efi files to corresponding BOOT*.EFI files)
helps also in my case to boot into the initial ram disk. It fails then because I copied 
all the files of the ISO image to a FAT32 filesystem which leads to failure in a later stage of the installer.

My machine is a Intel Haswell i7-4790K on an Asrock Z97 Extreme 4 Motherboard with 
BIOS version 2.60.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
shim version included in Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-37-20221017.n.0.iso

How reproducible:

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot Workstation ISO on an affected machine.


Actual results:
Boot fails with:

Invalid image
Failed to read header: Unsupported
Failed to load header: Unsupported
start_image() returned Unsupported

Expected results:
Installer booting.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Michael Riss 2022-10-18 19:36:31 UTC

There seems to be a related issue upstream:

https://github.com/rhboot/shim/issues/490

Comment 2 Michael Riss 2022-10-19 23:00:33 UTC

Some more info:
- I have secure boot disabled on my machine.
- I did some more experimenting. I copied the contents of the Live ISO image to an USB stick with FAt32 file system as before. But this time
I addressed the problem later in the boot chain. The issue is that the second stage is located with a kernel boot parameter such as "root=live:CDLABEL=Fedora-WS-Live-37-20221018-n-0". This file system label is too long for a FAT32 file system and hence the problem. Once I shorten this label down to 8 letters and adapt the kernel boot parameters the second stage also works.
With this setup I was able to drill down to the problem:
- copying grubx64.efi to BOOTX64.EFI still works as described above
- I downloaded and compiled several versions of the shim package https://github.com/rhboot/shim. Each time I copied the resulting shimx64.efi binary to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI of the Live Image.
- the latest master version solves the problem
- using the last version before the proposed fix (https://github.com/rhboot/shim/commit/4fd484e4c29364b4fdf4d043556fa0a210c5fdfc) still shows the problem
- the one one commit with the proposed fix (https://github.com/rhboot/shim/commit/14d63398298c8de23036a4cf61594108b7345863) also resolves the problem
So, for me the proposed fix does the trick and from my side I suggest to include it into future versions of the install images.

What I could not test yet are actual ISO images. I tried to find a working guide showing how to build such an installation/live ISO image, but so far I had no luck (pointers are welcome).

Comment 3 Thomas Crider 2023-04-21 21:30:45 UTC

this appears to be a duplicate of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2113005

Comment 4 Michael Riss 2023-07-24 13:22:53 UTC

Closing this issue as I have retired the machine on which the error showed up and hence cannot test possible fixes for it.