What is that new stuff on the screen before booting Fedora now?

Ask Fedora
1

So I upgraded my kernel from 6.4.9 to one of the compiled F40 kernels.

There’s something very new appearing on screen when I boot Fedora now from the new kernel that wasn’t there before. And I can’t find any log of it anywhere.

It literally flashes on the screen and disappears forever. But it looks so interesting and new and shiny that I want to see what it is. I can’t read it fast enough, it’s gone in 500 milliseconds off screen.

I just saw that it says something like EFI someting someting. It’s completely new, nevar seen it before. I have not changed to UEFI boot or anything, everything is the same, not booting from UEFI…I think I have seen something EFI related in the kernel config that may be new…

Help!

2

Perhaps you can try to record a video of it?

3

I might have to, if no one knows.

4

I see the same thing and it appears to flash something about the bios and mokutil. See it on both my laptop and desktop (and only since installing either the 6.10.6 or 6.10.7 kernels)

5

The craziest thing I can’t find anything in any logs. Is that the new way? Or the Fedora way? :slight_smile:

6

The logs don’t start rolling until systemd is loaded, so this must be happening before that.

1 Like
7

Those are messages on screen from bios or the boot loader way before it gets to the OS so nothing there will ever be logged.

8

Certainly not from BIOS because I have never seen it show before. Bootloader? Unlikely because this happens AFTER bootloader selection is chosen. So it must be kernel.

9

I’ve seen some concerning errors starting F39 or F40 from GRUB about hd0, sectors, or something, but as far as I can tell it isn’t directly related to HDD failure/errors (SMART passes, nothing from Windows/FreeBSD, afaik only on Fedora/GRUB and not openSUSE GRUB).

Since my drives don’t appear to be failing and boot always works regardless, I just ignored it and chalked it up to some cosmetic thing :stuck_out_tongue:

I boot UEFI, and usually do Custom Standard partitioning: XFS on /boot but iirc saw it with ext4 /boot too.

In my case the errors are right after Fedora is selected from GRUB and before it starts the kernel/dmesg stuff. I’m not quite sure if what I’m seeing is the same thing you are.

10

:100:

11

Ok, I managed to note the first thing it says now that’s now. It says “No EFI environment deted” and then gives a table of about 10-15 entries. I’ll take more details down next time I reboot. This is new, never had that table before, and it is not logged, which is disturbing.

12

Does it boot?

If it boots properly then it would seem more a cosmetic issue than a problem.

No, your messages are different, but the timing is the same. It seems part of the bios ↔ boot loader interaction to me.

I see it only on my daily driver and not my laptop or my other desktop system, which implies that it may be bios or hardware issue that triggers it.

13

That message comes from the kernel in the source file arch/x86/boot/compressed/efi.c

        if (!strncmp(sig, EFI64_LOADER_SIGNATURE, 4)) {
                et = EFI_TYPE_64;
        } else if (!strncmp(sig, EFI32_LOADER_SIGNATURE, 4)) {
                et = EFI_TYPE_32;
        } else {        
                debug_putstr("No EFI environment detected.\n");
                et = EFI_TYPE_NONE;
        }

That is in the very early boot phase. It depends on the interaction between the kernel , the grub loader, the shim, and the UEFI firmware.