On 22/12/2022 21:29, Chris Murphy wrote:
I don't think so. Power outage is a very common problem in some countries.
I still remember how unreliable FAT32 was in the Windows 9x era. You
needed to run a scandisk check after every power failure or pressing the
reset button. And sometimes your documents or other files disappeared. I
really don't want a repeat of this.
As mentioned many times already, vfat here is not used to keep files open for continuous
editing or things like that, where that experience might be repeated. It's
single-block or as-atomic-as-it-can-be single-file swap (and with newer kernels it looks
like there's actual atomic rename too). So "files disappearing" due to power
outages are extremely unlikely in this particular use case. The worst case scenario is
that you end up with both old-and-new UKIs, which means you can still boot (and
there's no "valuable" data to be lost here, everything that goes in the ESP
can be regenerated on the next boot). On the other hand reimplementing filesystem drivers
in the bootloader can result in broken filesystems or worse, security vulnerabilities.
This is something that actually happens and keeps happening.