On 24/02 22:39, Jonathan Moebius wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> the issue is solved.
>
> During research for Ralphs questions I realized my UEFI/BIOS was severly out
> of date (I had thought this would have been done during refurbishing of the
> device). After updating from a 2016 UEFI to one from 2020 (many thanks to HP
> for still supporting such a rather old device) Grub works from Devuan.
>
> Still it would be interesting, why Debian worked even with the old bios, but I
> guess I have neither EFI knowledge nor enough motivation to find out.
>
> Thanks a lot, all of you and a happy system-d free time!

Great.

The EFI setup for Devuan includes the ugly patch to copy
EFI/devuan/grub.cfg into EFI/debian/cfg in order to make the latter
available for debian's grub boot loader EFI/devuan/grubx64.efi which
is signed and requires that config file pathname. This makes the UEFI
menu say Devuan (from being found in EFI/devuan) which we thought
desirable, and to do differently would require a forked grub package.

This however makes it impossible to have both devuan and debian boot
setups on the one EFI partition, but one will need two separate EFI
partitions for the two different EFI/devuan/grub.cfg files, and an
UEFI bios that is happy with that.

I suppose this may and might not be the answer to why it didn't work
before, but it's in any case an explanation to a failure attemping to
have both debian and devuan on a UEFI host.

Ralph.