Hello, Gentoo. I've been having fun with systemd-boot.
On my new (2024-08) machine, on Friday 2024-12-06, I suddenly noticed that my /boot partition was empty, I can't remember why I looked at it. I am quite sure I didn't empty it myself. There then followed a couple of hours where I restored the boot manager, kernels, and the boot configuration. Thankfully, it booted again the next time I tried. On my old machine, I've been noticing over the past weeks that only two older kernels have been offered for booting, despite me installing later kernels to /boot/EFI/gentoo, and configuring them in /boot/loader. It all became clear yesterday and today. bootctl install had installed itself to /dev/nvme1n1p1 rather than /boot (which I have mounted on /dev/nvme0n1p1). Both of these partitions are EFI system partitions. It also clogged up my UEFI boot sequence with lots of extra entries, leaving nvme1 rather than nvme0 the prime EFI system partition for booting with. I've had a look at the manual page for bootctrl. It doesn't mention any way of specifying which EFI partition will get written to, and doesn't seem to mention that it changes the UEFI BIOS settings. Or maybe it does. It's a vague, poor quality manual. I don't need all this. Booting should not be fun. It should be boring, boring, boring. Boring and dependable. Could somebody perhaps suggest a better boot loader to me? I need to be able to chose between several kernels at booting time, but I certainly don't want something "refined" like grub - I just need what I thought systemd-boot actually was before yesterday. Thanks in advance! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
