On 06/21/2018 03:07 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 11:12 AM, Kyle Marek
<psppsn96(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I would greatly appreciate a move to a uniform GPT+EF02+EF00
> partitioning default with a shared boot loader config.
An ESP on BIOS is perhaps weird when making so much of this booting
and startup stuff user facing; but it's actually integrated in the
Matthew Garrett derivative of the BootLoaderSpec and is used as $BOOT.
I suppose it is weird without the context of EFI, but there's no reason
for it to cause issues.
In ancient times, there were some BIOS firmware floating about that
would face plant on encountering GPT, we tried it by default and it
caused too many problems and had to be reverted but that was long
enough ago it's possible such hardware is quite rare.
Wow, that really sucks, especially since most GPTs implement a
compatibility/protective MBR, anyway.
There's really no reason for this behavior to exist, but since it
did/does (and since it should be a minority), would it be reasonable to
invert the logic regarding inst.gpt? (default to GPT and use MBR only if
"inst.mbr" is set). I would think this is fair because the
choking-on-GPT issue really is more of a firmware bug than something
that should be treated as the lowest-common-denominator.
I would think it's more useful to have the GPT-default installations
supporting EF02 and EF00 than to use only MBR or EFI-only-GPT if it is
true that the anti-GPT BIOSes are rare.
There's also the issue that a lot of PXE firmwares boot BIOS-only on EFI
machines. Personally, I address this by loading iPXE off of a flash
drive, but for organizations that can't/won't do this, it would be
useful to make an EFI-capable install even if the installer was booted
with BIOS for this reason.
OK anyway, I don't see broad BLS consensus forming yet, but I do
see
two items that aren't controversial and could move forward as part of
this feature proposal:
a. Consistent $BOOT/loader/entries for UEFI and BIOS where $BOOT is
the ESP on UEFI, and $BOOT is "other" on BIOS (most likely the
existing /boot ext4 volume currently used). i.e. do not put
/loader/entries in /EFI/fedora
By "consistent", do you mean that both EFI and BIOS boot loaders will
reference the same entry files? I like that.
However, I don't like the entries existing on ESP mostly because of the
use case of md-RAID for /boot referenced in another thread. I think it
would be best to just put the GRUB EFI file on ESP and put the rest of
the bulk GRUB stuff in its utility partition (which may be RAID-ed).
I think GRUB using its own partition is fair especially because GRUB
isn't an EFI-only bootloader.
b. If GPT, installer always creates both EF02 and EF00 partitions.
For
creating VM images, I think it's sane if the anaconda inst.gpt option
is always used to make sure the image is created with GPT
partitioning, thereby making sure they get EF02 and EF00.
EF02 and EF00 good. I would prefer if this wasn't an EFI-only
conditional due to my above responses.
Thank you for your consideration!