Comment thread started by Tomasz Nowak on ESXi Arm Edition

Debian (10.10) (released on June 19th, 2021) no longer supports UEFI Secure Boot on arm64 systems!!!

Be aware: Upgrading Debian 10 VMs to the latest patches (shim-signed package) make the VMs unbootable under ESXi ARM Edition.

I checked the new Debian 11 and it boots fine :-)

ESXi Arm doesn't support the UEFI secure boot either, so this particular notice should not be an issue.

HOWEVER yes, debian 10.10 installer *and* updating an existing debian10 system will lead to unbootable system.
The virtual UEFI fails, and with a serial port attached we can read:

Synchronous Exception at 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

We will take a look ASAP.

Hi Tomasz, it looks like the new UEFI shim is causing troubles. Here's how to workaround it: open VM settings, force BIOS setup entry in the VM Boot Options, enter the EFI Shell, and start fs0:\efi\debian\grubaa64.efi directly.

Then in Linux, run "efibootmgr -c -l efi\\debian\\grubaa64.efi" as root to make the workaround permanent.

Thanks again for reporting the issue!

Hi Cyprien,
Thank you for your time and provided workaround. I was able to boot the VMs again :)

Tomasz