[SOLVED] How do I know if ProxMox is booting with grub or systemd-boot?

nosuch

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Jul 5, 2019
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I'm currently unable to tell which system ProxMox is using to boot. I know that the BIOS boot type being UEFI or legacy should be an indicator, but I wonder if there is a way to verify this on a working system.
 
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FYI: for now we only use systemd-boot when booting ZFS as root, other cases may follow though in the future.

There are a few differences which can be told:
* The boot loader looks pretty different, GRUB is well GRUB, by default blue menu and a grub written somewhere. systemd-boot is just very plain black.

* On the booted system you can normally tell by checking if /etc/kernel/pve-efiboot-uuids exists, if not you're highly probably using GRUB

In general you can check if you booted with UEFI mode (independent of which bootloader) by looking if the path /sys/firmware/efi is populated, else it's empty or doesn't exists at all.
 
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Looks like I was indeed using systemd-boot, thank you for explaining. This was interesting to me because I have the BIOS mode set to legacy boot (HP z420) which I thought would force a grub boot. However since I installed with ZFS as root it must have been able to use UEFI anyway. As a followup, what does the "boot to firmware" option in systemd-boot do?
 
As a followup, what does the "boot to firmware" option in systemd-boot do?

It should boot into your Firmware (= BIOS / UEFI) "settings dialogue", i.e., the thing you can normally access by hitting some special key like F2, F11 or Del on initial boot.
 
I'm currently unable to tell which system ProxMox is using to boot. I know that the BIOS boot type being UEFI or legacy should be an indicator, but I wonder if there is a way to verify this on a working system.
For anyone else with similar brain workings to me, I had trouble with just the info in this thread.
What ended up helping me definitively determine grub vs systemd was this page: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#sysboot

Simply look at your bootloader screen (blue is grub, white on black is systemd), alternatively do efibootmgr -v
 
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