On Wed, Aug 05, 2020 at 09:26:47PM +1200, quixote wrote: >Thanks very much for your answers. There's something bizarre going on. Yes, my >/sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ said it was full and had dump-* files in it. I >removed those a few days ago. But after your comment I went to look if there >were new ones cluttering the place up. No, there weren't, but > > >df -h /sys/firmware/efi/efivars returned: > >Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on > >efivarfs 0 0 0 - /sys/firmware/efi/efivars > > >Why would it think it was full? Especially after I'd removed about fifty dump >files, which have not reappeared.
You *may* need to reboot to let the firmware clean up underneath; the management of EFI variable space by firmware can often be fairly terrible. :-( I'd recommend you have an installation/live image on USB first, just in case you need to boot in rescue mode to get back in to your system. >Yes, I have a /boot/efi partition. I did get the size wrong: it's 512 MB , of >which 7.97MB is used. The root partition is 30GB.) > >I tried > >apt-get install --reinstall grub-efi > >which eventually returned: > >Unpacking grub-efi (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2) over (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2) ... > >Setting up grub-efi (2.02+dfsg1-20+deb10u2) ... > >As far as I can tell, that's the correct, new version. I also reinstalled >grub-common and grub2-common, also seemed to be up to date. Yup, that's the correct version. >But, given the "no space available" in efivars dir, I'm not too surprised that >an attempt to > >grub-install /dev/nvme0n1 > >just says no space left on device. Right. >I've seen instructions on manually removing obsolete entries in the efivars >dir, but I don't think that would help since manually removing dump-* files >didn't solve the problem. > >(I changed "stable" to "buster" in sources.list. The computer is a Lenovo >Thinkpad X1 Carbon, with three Debian versions on it in separate partitions. No >windows. Separate /home partition. In case any of that is relevant.) > >So, it seems it's somehow stuck on efivars being full, when it isn't?! ACK. Please try a reboot, let's see if that helps. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com 'There is some grim amusement in watching Pence try to run the typical "politician in the middle of a natural disaster" playbook, however incompetently, while Trump scribbles all over it in crayon and eats some of the pages.' -- Russ Allbery
