this may, or may not be a bug, but I suggest incorporating the new versions, as it helped me. What I did. (installed efitools-1.4.2-r1) did efi-readvar -v KEK -o OLD_KEK.esl result -> No efivarfs filesystem is mounted (checked) ... (mount -l | grep efi) : efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime) (ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars) : (lots of stuff) so my efivars is mounted. also, I checked kernel config, for weirdness (zcat /proc/config.gz | grep EFI) 360:CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y 553:CONFIG_EFI=y 554:CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y 555:CONFIG_EFI_MIXED=y 3262:CONFIG_FB_EFI=y 4154:CONFIG_XEN_EFI=y 4325:CONFIG_DMI_SCAN_MACHINE_NON_EFI_FALLBACK=y 4330:# EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) Support 4332:# CONFIG_EFI_VARS is not set 4333:CONFIG_EFI_ESRT=y 4334:CONFIG_EFI_RUNTIME_MAP=y 4335:CONFIG_EFI_RUNTIME_WRAPPERS=y 4418:CONFIG_CACHEFILES=y 4419:# CONFIG_CACHEFILES_DEBUG is not set 4420:CONFIG_CACHEFILES_HISTOGRAM=y 4460:CONFIG_EFIVAR_FS=y 4778:# CONFIG_EARLY_PRINTK_EFI is not set CONFIG_EFI_VARS (not set) as far as I know my efi partition is mounted properly. ****** now I cloned from the repo ... git clone http://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jejb/efitools.git/ and checked out 1.4.2 to see if that source would work right ... (./efi-readvar -v PK -o old_PK.esl ) result = No efivarfs filesystem is mounted make clean, git checkout v1.4.3 result this time - no error about the efi partition not being mounted.
oh yeah, I am running kernel 4.3.6
This is a kernel configuration issue, not a efitools issue, you can build, and use, efitools without any filesystem mounted for uefi at all. So I'm closing this out, thanks.