[Bug 1910571] Re: menu-selection keys do not work (intermittently, but frequently making boot choice impossible!)

[Mary S]

For anyone who's interested, I installed systemd-boot as per the link
above, but my ESP partition was too small (Windows creates a 100Mb
partition but a 1Gb is more useful for dual boots). So, I created a new
ESP on my second disk, and pointed efibootmgr -d to use it. Eventually,
this seems to at least boot Windows and Ubuntu now, so some progress. I
haven't got to removing grub and lilo yet (as per the second link
above), so we'll see how well Ubuntu updates...

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Title:
  menu-selection keys do not work (intermittently, but frequently making
  boot choice impossible!)

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  This has started happening in the last month or so. I have a clean LTS
  20.04.1 that is kept up to date.

  On boot, the menu is presented to select what to boot, but quite often
  (currently about 90% of boots), NONE OF THE KEYS WORK, so I cannot
  select what to boot!

  Randomly, sometimes the keys do work.

  This used to work fine all the time, so maybe it's a fairly recent
  change to grub?

  I've seen various other similar bugs with various potential solutions,
  and I've tried most of them with no luck.

  To me, there seems to be some kind of timing issue that causes the
  keyboard not to be detected properly some of the time, and is making
  boot-choice IMPOSSIBLE!

  This is a critical bug for me, and it's making it impossible for me to
  boot into Windows (in my dual boot), which is making the computer
  almost useless for me!

  As a note, I would hope that an LTS release *never* changed grub
  unless _ritical_ as without a working grub, I cannot use Ubuntu!
  Thankfully, Ubuntu is my default, so I can always boot into that, and
  the keyboard is always fine there, but this is a very annoying problem
  that's making my PC only half-useful, so please can you give this
  urgent attention and fix it, thanks!!

  
  my system info:

  $ lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
  Release:	20.04

  $ apt-cache policy grub2
  grub2:
    Installed: (none)
    Candidate: 2.04-1ubuntu26.7
    Version table:
       2.04-1ubuntu26.7 500
          500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/universe amd64 Packages
       2.04-1ubuntu26.2 500
          500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security/universe amd64 Packages
       2.04-1ubuntu26 500
          500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages

  What I expected: to be able to choose an OS to boot
  What happened: the keys do not work, so I cannot choose anything and the default is always selected instead).
  --- 
  ProblemType: Bug
  ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.14
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
  CurrentDesktop: XFCE
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-02-23 (320 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20200203.1)
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
  Package: grub2 (not installed)
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-59.65-generic 5.4.78
  Tags:  focal
  Uname: Linux 5.4.0-59-generic x86_64
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-09-29 (100 days ago)
  UserGroups: adm audio cdrom dip docker kvm libvirt lpadmin microk8s plugdev sambashare sudo
  _MarkForUpload: True
  --- 
  ProblemType: Bug
  ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.16
  Architecture: amd64
  CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
  CurrentDesktop: XFCE
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2020-02-23 (367 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20200203.1)
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
  Package: grub2 (not installed)
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-65.73-generic 5.4.78
  Tags:  focal
  Uname: Linux 5.4.0-65-generic x86_64
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-09-29 (147 days ago)
  UserGroups: adm audio cdrom dip docker kvm libvirt lpadmin microk8s plugdev sambashare sudo
  _MarkForUpload: True

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