Can't boot after firmware upgrade, stuck on EFI stub (Dell XPS 16 9640)

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1

At the end of 2024 I installed Fedora 40 on my Dell XPS 16" 9640 laptop and everything ran fine until I did a firmware upgrade under Windows, in around March 2025 or so.

Now when I boot, all I see is a caret and nothing happens. If I boot with nosplash, then I get this message:

EFI stub: UEFI Secure Boot is enabled.

and nothing else.

I get the exact same problem when booting older kernels or recovery. The install is now on Fedora 41, but if I try to boot the Fedora 40 USB stick that was originally used to install the system, I get the same result. I also tried a Fedora 42 USB stick with no luck.

I’ve also tried disabled Secure Boot, it did not help. Instead I just don’t get any message on my screen.

I also tried booting ubuntu live, and it works fine.

So now I’m stuck!

How can I troubleshoot this? Is there a way I can get some kind of more verbose log or trigger a stack dump to figure out where the system is stuck? Can the system be remotely debugged?

And why is this booting through the EFI stub? I thought this was only necessary to boot without Grub?

Edit: this is likely a duplicate of this topic: Cannot boot into installation media or installed Fedora system on Dell XPS 16 9640 after BIOS update - #10 by peterkgw

It didn’t show up in the search with the keywords I originally used :woman_shrugging:

2

The issue was that I still had the broken Dell firmware, and that Dell’s automatic update tools incorrectly stated that everything was up-to-date. The solution was to manually download and install the latest firmware.

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3

Which tools? I’ve encountered firmware updates supported in UEFI/BIOS, Dell’s Support Assistant, .exe’s from Dell Support, and Fedora’s fwupdmgr and fwupdtool. They don’t always agree on what is availble. I’m in Canada and often see delays for vendor updates – I assume waiting for French translations (maybe AI will reduce delays but give less accurate translations).

4

No, I think they use separate databases, and it seems they are almost always out of sync. :person_facepalming:

5

Both Support Assistant and Dell Command never showed that firmware update. I didn’t think of trying fwupdtool when I booted in Ubuntu, since I didn’t realize this was the issue, and of course I couldn’t run Fedora’ fwupdmgr.

6

Ubuntu has fwupdmgr.