vmware / vmware/photon

Photon 5 ISO images appear to not contain UEFI boot loaders

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bug
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C
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Description

Describe the bug

Network installing via Kickstart of Photon 5 dde71ec57 (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.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Download and mount the Photon 5 ISO at the reported URL, then inspect the EFI/BOOT and boot/efi paths and search for bootx files as described. Done means the generated x86_64 ISO contains EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi and supports the reported UEFI network-install workflow.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
linux
Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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