Hi,
I am using a Dell XPS 15 7590 laptop. When I installed Slackware 15 it had me create partitions for EFI, Linux and Swap. Went through those no issue, installed Slack 15 without issue and running the system currently. It has been many years since I have used Slackware and really missed the level of control afforded vs other distributions.

When I tried to compile a new kernel and update elilo I keep getting an error about /boot/efi is read only. I have searched the forums and all mention copying the new kernel into the EFI/Slackware folder and I am not able to. It is also strange that the EFI folder shows an old Windows and Debian entry even after clearing all partitions and recreating from scratch.

Is this normal? Does Dell do something special with EFI and creates it's own partition?

Thanks, Pete

/boot/efi should be an empty directory. Its sole purpose is to act as a mountpoint for the EFI system partition (ESP). The permissions of this directory are usually rwxr-xr-x so that root can write to the partition when it is mounted.

Also check the entry for the ESP in /etc/fstab to make sure it isn't being mounted read-only.

If you have weird stuff in this directory even after the ESP has been cleared and recreated, then my guess is that you copied those files over when the ESP wasn't mounted and they went into the actual directory.

Hi Hazel,
Thank you for the quick reply.

Here is the line in fstab:

/dev/nvme0n1p1 /boot/efi vfat defaults 1 0


Folder permissions:

bash-5.1$ cd /boot/efi
bash-5.1$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jul 30 12:30 EFI
bash-5.1$ cd EFI
bash-5.1$ ls -l
ls: cannot access 'Dell': Input/output error
total 8
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? Dell
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 29 02:19 Slackware
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 24 02:01 debian



And the directory structure:

bash-5.1$ cd /boot/efi
bash-5.1$ tree
.
└── EFI
├── Slackware
│** ├── elilo.conf
│** ├── elilo.efi
│** ├── initrd.gz
│** └── vmlinuz
└── debian
├── BOOTX64.CSV
├── fbx64.efi
├── grub.cfg
├── grubx64.efi
├── mmx64.efi
└── shimx64.efi

3 directories, 10 files

Using nano for an editor, when I open elilo.conf it shows in red highlight [ File '/boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf' is unwritable ]

That unknown Dell folder has me thinking something behind the scenes is going on. The partition I created was 256Mb for EFI. The one mounted is 511Mb

From cgdisk:
1 256.0 MiB EFI system partition

From df -h:
/dev/nvme0n1p1 511M 23M 489M 5% /boot/efi

Any help is greatly appreciated and anything needed from my end to help please let me know.

Thanks, Pete

Do a file system check on the partition.

Thank you again for helping. When I tried to run fsck on the partition (booted with the install USB stick to be safe) I kept receiveing an invalid seek error. Ended up copying the Slackware folder to my local disk and formatting the partition again. It is now showing the correct partition size and isn't read only anymore.

Thank you for helping me through this annoying issue.

Sometimes NVMe drives need to have their power settings tweaked to perform stabily.

Check out Post NVMe install power limiting.

bash-5.1$ ls -l
^
|
have you tried running as "#(root)" instead of $(standard user)?

-met-hinx-

I set my nvme drive to the lowest power level, and it works flawlessly when laptop is plugged into ac, or when battery is above 10%.

But when it is less than 10%, I get read/write errors similar to what you are describing.