Re: always update the bootloader during major upgrades
On Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 1:19 AM Nicolas Mailhot via devel
<devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Le jeudi 27 juin 2019 à 12:26 -0600, Chris Murphy a écrit :
> Yep, small problem. And I'm not even sure how a 'grub2-install' on
> BIOS systems would be initiated only at major upgrade time. But even
> Fedora Rawhide does change versions when fcXX becomes fcXX+1, but is
> that a sane trigger?
It's not, such magic “it's FCX time” break all the time for users that
only do dnf update, or use rawhide (which branches before the next
version logic is deployed), etc
Twice a year for Rawhide. And upon initiation of major upgrade on
release versions. It wouldn't be all the time.
> I'm not sure what the alternatives are.
That's, easy,
1. add a generic bootctl install command that knows the different
variants of bootloader used in Fedora, how to install them, how to
identify which variant is appropriate for a system (make grub and other
bootloaders packages install the corresponding info in a directory read
by this command)
2. make it write the id, generation, and deployment options used in a
lockfile every time it (re)installs the bootloader
3. add a config file with a variable to inhibit auto-redeployment
4. add a scriptlet to the bootctl package that calls bootctl install
and
– checks the variant in the lockfile is appropriate for the hardware
(in case of disk mode or copy)
– checks if the generation is current or unknown (unknown = future, do
not touch)
– and if any of those is false, reinstalls the bootloader, unless the
inhibit variable is set
5. add a --force switch to bootctl to allow the operator to force a
bootloader rewrite every time somethins else broke it
I think that's completely out of scope. It's inappropriate to wait 10
months let alone 10 years to resolve this problem. And it's an overly
complicated solution. It sounds like the bootloader install equivalent
of grubby that was just deprecated in Fedora 30, not least of which it
was so overly complicated it was difficult getting people to
contribute to or maintain it. Yet another one command to rule them
all? No thanks.
It might be sane for Anaconda to write out a file, or modify
/etc/default/grub, to indicate the user chose to prevent the Fedora
bootloader from being installed (as far as I'm aware this only
actually works on x86 BIOS computers even though it's presented in the
UI for all other firmwares and archs) when Fedora was installed. And
from that information, infer that they do not want the Fedora
bootloader (re)installed.
--
Chris Murphy