Photon 5 ISO images appear to not contain UEFI boot loaders

[sygibson]

Describe the bug

Network installing via Kickstart of Photon 5 dde71ec (Full, Minimal, or RT) all appear to be missing UEFI boot loaders to boot successfully on UEFI based systems.

root@sm-drp:/mnt# mount | grep photon-5
/srv/isos/photon-5.0-dde71ec57.x86_64.iso on /mnt type iso9660 (ro,relatime,nojoliet,check=s,map=n,blocksize=2048,iocharset=utf8)
root@sm-drp:/mnt# ls EFI/BOOT boot/efi/EFI/BOOT boot/efi
ls: cannot access 'EFI/BOOT': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access 'boot/efi/EFI/BOOT': No such file or directory
boot/efi:
root@sm-drp:/mnt# find . -type f -name "bootx*"
root@sm-drp:/mnt# find . -type f -name "*efi"
root@sm-drp:/mnt#

Unable to successfully boot a Photon 5 system via the network to perform kickstart install.

Reproduction steps

1. download iso: https://packages.vmware.com/photon/5.0/GA/iso/photon-5.0-dde71ec57.x86_64.iso
2. mount iso
3. inspect iso; search for EFI boot loaders
   ...

Expected behavior

For amd64/x86_64 - expect EFI boot loader:
EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi

For arm64/aarch64 - expect EFI boot loader:
EFI/BOOT/bootaa64.efi

Additional context

Network install from DHCP/PXE server. Environment successfully builds about 50 other Linux distros/versions via Legacy BIOS and UEFI boot (both secure boot, and non-secure boot) currently without issues. Only the Photon Linux ISOs seem to be missing the UEFI boot loaders.

[jaankit]

Hi @sygibson ,

Boot loader binaries are packaged inside /boot/grub2/efiboot.img in iso [1] . efiboot.img is a boot image file , there is a "El Torito" boot data which tells the UEFI loader where this efiboot.img is located [2].

root@photon-b88997fc2c38 [ ~ ]# mount /mnt/iso/boot/grub2/efiboot.img /mnt/efi/
root@photon-b88997fc2c38 [ ~ ]# ls /mnt/efi/
EFI
root@photon-b88997fc2c38 [ ~ ]# ls /mnt/efi/EFI/BOOT/
bootx64.efi  grubx64.efi

For chroot creation, these boot loader binaries comes from "grub2-efi-image" package [3] during installation process.

As per my knowledge, we verified PXE boot during 5.0 GA testing phase. @prashant1221, can confirm the steps with which we validated PXE boot.

[1] : https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/5.0/support/image-builder/iso/mk-install-iso.sh#L100-L109
[2] : https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/5.0/support/image-builder/iso/mk-install-iso.sh#L304
[3] : https://github.com/vmware/photon/blob/5.0/SPECS/grub2/grub2.spec#L199

Thanks.