Ubuntu
grub2 package

  1. Bug #425979
  2. Comment #37

Comment 37 for bug 425979

Revision history for this message
Daniel Richard G. (skunk) wrote :

Hello everyone,

There is a bug report similar to this one on the Debian side:

    https://bugs.debian.org/902928

There, Colin Watson made an interesting comment:

> When I last looked into this, this wasn't possible with UEFI: the
> firmware doesn't tell us about held modifier keys. You'll probably need
> to use a short but non-zero timeout and press Escape instead.
>
> (It's possible that more recent versions of the UEFI spec have improved
> this; but if so then somebody would need to implement that in GRUB, and
> it would still only work if you had new enough firmware.)

So it would seem that the old way of bringing up the GRUB menu by holding down the Shift key just doesn't work in this brave new UEFI world anymore.

It would be interesting to hear if anyone is aware of a system that boots in UEFI mode and *does* respond to the held Shift key. Currently, I don't believe it's clear as to whether this is an architectural limitation of UEFI (i.e. it can't be fixed), or if newer UEFI firmware versions could potentially make held modifier keys usable.