On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 9:47 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 10:27:54AM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:

> We really need to use the boot loader spec by default. Is there any
> reason why the support for it was added to grub, but not enabled ?

The full spec is incompatible with standard practices for the EFI system
partition, and especially incompatible with the way we handle Mac
hardware, so adoption is unlikely. The boot fragments are more
attractive, but don't currently let us express the full set of
configuration that we support (there's no way to specify chainloading
another bootloader, for instance). These seem fixable, but nobody's
currently fixing them.

Only addressing the chainload concern,
According to the spec, the bootloader could use both normal configuration AND boot fragments.

This means that chainloading can still be done the way it is done now, and those boot fragments
will only be used to load OSs that implement this specification.

Since you don't need to update chainload settings so often as you need to update regular boot
entries, this seems fine to me.

Regarding the Mac concern, I understand that it's incompatible because we reuse the existing
EFI system partition on Mac hardware. Is that correct?

Do you have any suggestions on how this can be fixed so we can use the bootloader spec?

Having a pile of shell scripts doing such a critical task seems extremely error-prone and broken.

-Elad Alfassa.