On Tue, 23 Mar 2021, Ian Jackson wrote:
Jan Beulich writes ("Re: [PATCH] xen: Create EFI_VENDOR directory"):
On 23.03.2021 13:34, Jason Andryuk wrote:
...
On Fedora, RPMs drop EFI binaries directly into /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/.
grub, shim, fwupdate and xen are all packaged that way. It seems
reasonable to have those important binaries tracked by the package
manager.
Does SuSE populate EFI_VENDOR from EFI_DIR when some boot loader
script is called?
Yes. And back at the time, when I consulted our EFI person, I was left
with the impression that this is the only reasonable approach. The
primary reason, as said, was that the EFI partition as a whole may get
rebuilt perhaps even from scratch at any point. Hence it's not
reasonable to expect package-managed files to live there.
I agree with this analysis but it is for people like Fedora to decide
how they want to build their packages.
There is also the case of ad-hoc packages (eg our "make debball")
which the user might reasonably choose to have dump things in the EFI
system partition.
Conversely, I see no downside to the mkdir. Jan, is there some actual
harm in it ? If not, we should be accomodating to people's build and
packaging strategies even if we don't entirely approve of them.
There is a request in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1750733
for xen on Fedora to install the efi file elsewhere and then copy it to
/boot/efi post install. I could change the current Fedora set up for
Fedora 35 (which should have xen-4.15) if there is a good reason to do so.
I am not sure how useful the xen.efi file in /boot/efi is anyway for the
the Fedora set up as it will generally use a xen*.gz file in /boot via
grub.
Michael Young
