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On 20.03.2024 21:12, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 20 Mar 2024 20:23:29 +0300, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
I'm being advised to increase the size of my UEFI partition - which is 4 GB and has 158 MB free - for a firmware update that is 21.2 KB in size, and the output from fwupdmgr is telling me that efivarfs doesn't have enough free space (it has 20KB free).
Oh, I was not aware that it can show it. Do you have anything in dmesg?
Nothing in dmesg. I determined the free space using:
[jhenderson@TheEarth ~]$ df -h /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on efivarfs 128K 104K 20K 85% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
(Current) Linux kernel keeps safety margin of 5K. You may force it into using all available space with efi_no_storage_paranoia kernel parameter, but please keep in mind that this parameter was introduced after actual case of bricking laptops. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/22855.html It was made less aggressive as initially it reserved 50%, but still you never know what happens if you drive firmware to the extreme.
Storage space in UEFI is not large, so several KB does make a difference.
Indeed it does.
The issue is with the constraints in the nvram where this data is stored itself, and not the UEFI boot partition on my SSD, correct?
Yes.
Thank you for the confirmation. I was pretty sure that was the case, but after going back and forth several times with the suggestion to "increase the size of the UEFI partition", I thought I might be missing something.
(As a "bonus question", messing around with just deleting stuff like the dbx files in efivarfs could potentially brick the system, right?)
I suppose, removing some variables whose existence is taken for granted by firmware may well do it. I vaguely remember having seen something like this. dbx should not be essential, but how knows.
Actually you should not be able to remove dbx, as for the others ... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/43ls7j/no_post_after_rm_rf_systemd_u...
What says
df -h /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/
(See above)
I had seen something on another type of system (a Lenovo laptop) about there maybe being an option in the UEFI settings to restore factory keys - and if that option exists, that might be an approach that works.
(https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/5603 is where that comment is)
Yes, this may help, but it means you will lose all EFI configuration (boot entries, shim certificates etc).