Cure found for kernel updates

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:27:36PM +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:03 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org>wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> 
> Can't we store those fragments in the same filesystem /boot is on?

We can, but the spec requires that it be VFAT, and it's not reasonable 
for us to make /boot VFAT (no selinux labelling, for instance).

> On that note, is there any way we could verify bootloader configuration
> before reboot, so we could
> automatically revert to a known-working (ie. the config file we booted
> with) configuration in case
> the update messed something up?

We could probably extract the grub config parser into an external tool 
that performed at least minimal verification of each option. That's not 
a bad plan.

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