Title: UEFI, NVMe and being stubborn
Slug: UEFI-NVMe-and-being-stubborn
Date: 2015-12-15 23:36:00
Author: Kartones
Lang: en
Tags: Systems-IT, Linux, Troubleshooting, Operating Systems
Description: Installing Linux on a Dell XPS 13 9350 laptop, encountering issues with UEFI booting and Ubuntu, and learning about NVM Express controllers.

 <p>This weekend I wanted to install Linux on my new work laptop (a Dell XPS 13 9350, just in case someone else runs into similar issues). As in the past I had some issues with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface">UEFI</a> booting and Ubuntu (versions 12 &amp; 14), the first thing I did was to go to the BIOS and proceed to unenforce secure boot and enable legacy boot (the classic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS">BIOS</a>), tried to install Unbutu 15.10 from a USBdrive... and it was broke trying to install GRUB after the install itself.</p> <p>An initial research about the failure trying to setup the bootloader at <font face="Courier New">/dev/nvme0p1</font> (instead of the classic <font face="Courier New">/dev/sda1</font>) taught me about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVM_Express">NVM Express controllers</a> (aka NVME). I thought that maybe updating gparted to 0.24 (which supports MVNE) would be solved. To do that I:</p> <ol> <li>Booted Ubuntu 15.10 from the USB  </li><li>Installed the <code>http://www.getdeb.net/updates/ubuntu/15.10/</code> package</li><li><font face="Courier New">sudo apt-get install gparted</font>  </li><li>Create the partitions from gparted and when installing just use them (wiping the data but not recreating anything)</li></ol> <p>It didn't worked out :(  I could see the hard disk partitions but install would still fail at the bootloader (final) step.</p> <p>Next I tried to just reinstall GRUB bootloader (using <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair">Boot-Repair</a>), with some retries recompiling GRUB and even updating the partition Linux kernel to latest one to be sure... without luck. Bootloader was installed but couldn't boot the OS.</p> <p>Two afternoons later I decided to do one last attempt before giving up: As the laptop's boot menu allows me to run the USBdrive Ubuntu install using UEFI (instead of "legacy boot"), I just tried running it to see what would do... And it worked!</p> <p>If I had just RTFM <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI">about ubuntu UEFI support</a> I would have seen that now it works and that Ubuntu 15.10 can somehow manage NVME partitions at install time (despite having an old version of gparted...). Anyway, I learned about some recent developments in "BIOS" and HDD firmwares so not all was wasted time &amp; effort.</p> <p>Also it is interesting to see how Intel seems to be leading in this evolutionary changes by presenting specifications and opening them to others so they become standards.</p> <p> </p> <p>Note: A the time of this writing, everything works fine in the XPS 9350 model with the mentioned Ubuntu 15.10 except the wifi, which seems to be a "too new" Broadcom model and doesn't even gets detected, so I'm stuck for the time being with having to rely on an external USB wifi donge.</p>