On Jan 13, 2014, at 5:24 AM, Harald Hoyer <harald.ho...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/10/2014 11:57 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>> On Thu, 2014-01-09 at 14:30 +0100, Harald Hoyer wrote:
>>> 
>>> That's the reason we came up with
>>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/
>>> 
>>> and even have a patch for grub2
>>> http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/grub2.git/tree/0460-blscfg-add-blscfg-module-to-parse-Boot-Loader-Specif.patch
>>> 
>>> If all bootloaders would follow the spec, nothing has to be configured 
>>> manually
>>> and would just use the dropin directories.
>> 
>> So what's the hold-up?
>> 
> 
> For Fedora, it's the grub maintainer thinking, that you cannot add directories
> in the EFI partition without registering the name, although it's only required
> for subdirs in the /EFI top-level directory.


My understanding is GRUB2 upstream hasn't accepted patches to use 
bootloaderspec drop in files, but the Fedora derived GRUB2 does. Is that 
incorrect?

I see the bootloaderspec as not going far enough. Its two best parts: 
acknowledgment of the miserable linux boot UX and lack of cooperation among 
distros to do better; and the drop-in configuration files rather than always 
modifying grub.cfg.

However, the spec says $BOOT shall be FAT or EXT[234] based, nothing else; and 
further that the kernel & initramfs will be located relative to $BOOT. This 
effectively breaks rollback using bootable snapshots, as well as resilient boot 
in the face of a drive failure because it effectively proscribes $BOOT on 
Btrfs, or md raid1/raid5.

On UEFI, the preferred location for $BOOT is the EFI System partition, but 
could be a newly defined partition, shared among all distributions. But this 
further makes this $BOOT fragile, especially if it's the ESP, with no suggested 
mechanism for rescuing it or syncing it with other disks in multiple disk 
systems. Instead of needing to come up with a way to sync multiple ESPs (or 
$BOOTs) it makes more sense for $BOOT to be as generic as possible, with 
generic per distro configurations that point to their real configuration file 
location - and leave it up to the distros if they use a drop-in approach or 
not, within their own $BOOT.


There are more concerns discussed in this thread:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159172&p=1


Chris Murphy
-- 
devel mailing list
devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct

Reply via email to