Cure found for kernel updates

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 09:57:17PM +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:

> 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.

That's doable, but it'd be nice to actually fix it in the spec so we 
don't have to worry about storing configuration in two separate places.

> 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?

Remove the requirement that the ESP be $BOOT. The downside of that is 
that we'll then have *yet another* partition (/boot, because we want 
kernels stored on a filesystem that supports xattrs, /boot/efi for the 
ESP, /boot/whatever for storing the config fragments) which isn't a huge 
issue for GPT but would be annoying with MBR.

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

Something's still going to be generating config and something else is 
going to be parsing it, and in this case the breakage could just as 
easily have been caused by whatever writes the fragments.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org