@nprofile1q... To be very clear, the issue I have with autotools here isn't the test, written by grub devs and needed regardless of the buildsystem.
The issue is autotools allowing to outright lie about what gets run: $CC and then $OBJCOPY
So you end up with a very strange-looking failure where you have to dig into the configure script, which is always a pain.
(And of course autotools filters out the errors so you need to dig in config.log as well instead of just build logs)