When installing grub to multiple EFI partitions they all have the same label in the EFI vars

[Tony Middleton]

I have been trying out the new facility to install grub to multiple efi partitions. Both of the efi entries shown in efibootmgr have the same label and these are all that is shown in the boot selection menu on my systems making it impossible to distinguish between them.

Each entry should be given a different label to enable choosing the entry required.

I am using grub2 (2.04-1ubuntu26) on a Focal system.

[oldfred (oldfred)]

Similar:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1450783
And:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1450783
And:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1561712

I do change /etc/default/grub and get new entry in UEFI.
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=kubuntu
But it always uses /EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg to boot not /EFI/kubuntu/grub.cfg. But a different entry in UEFI.
Or you can create an entry like shown in Bug above with grub-install --bootloader-id=myid or just in UEFI with efibootmgr and different description.Entry in UEFI uses GUID/partUUID to know which ESP to boot from.
Most systems only allow one active ESP per device, but once configured, you may be able to use any FAT32 partition with .efi boot files.

If in different ESP, then any of the options to create a different id should work, but you may need /EFI/ubuntu folder in ESP as well.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

I don't believe there is a need for different labels, or a good kind of ID to display, even. The use case of the code is for raid1 where each disk in the raid1 mirror contains the same ESP, so they are all functionally equivalent - the point is that you can fallback to another if one of the disk fails / is removed.

[Tony Middleton (ximera)]

I strongly disagree. If you have a machine that has boot problems, knowing which entry is which could be very helpful when trying to resolve.

[Julian Andres Klode (juliank)]

Luckily the boot order is, well, ordered, so you can figure out where the error was once you successfully booted, by looking at efibootmgr and investigating. You need to get it booted anyway, so this hardly seems more effort.

We could change the entry to say "ubuntu on on 512110 MB SAMSUNG MZVLB512HAJQ-000L7" or such but that seems like it does not add much info in the usual use cases, because well, most disks will have the same name and size in RAID1.