New UEFI guide on the wiki

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2014-02-04 at 14:45 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:

> > You of all people know the consequences of adding more complexity to the
> > installer's partitioning codepaths. ;)
> 
> Yeah what's complex is error checking whether an ESP is needed, and
> whether it's present, and the "not present" gripe code, translating
> into (how many languages are we supporting these days?) and testing
> all of that. For no good reason.

That code isn't particularly complex, actually, and we've had it for
years - that's why the error message used to be so crappy, because it's
generic code. There's a generic framework for requirements for stage1
bootloader targets depending on the platform. When creating a new
platform you basically fill out a checklist for its requirements for a
bootloader stage1 target device. For the BIOS platform that's "an MBR or
GPT disk". For UEFI platform it's "an EFI system partition on a GPT
disk". For uboot-y ARM it's "a U-Boot partition". Etc etc. All using a
solid mechanism that's been in anaconda for years.

What you're suggesting is something different and, I think, completely
new - I'm not the foremost expert on blivet or anything, but I don't
think it has capabilities anything like what you're suggesting at
present.

Functionally speaking your description makes sense - this is just the
place where the bootloader goes and we used to just take care of it for
you and now we don't. But that's really not how it looks to the
installer or the installer UI. The old bootloader location was not a
disk partition, the user interacting with the installer could barely
'see' or 'touch' it at all. It had very limited configurability. None of
this is true of the ESP (or similar designs).

> 
> Windows and OS X? It's one size fits all. Your boot disks get an ESP. No options. On OS X actually, all GPT disks get an ESP whether they're intended for booting or not. There is no option, no visible indication at all that the disk has or will get one and no way to specify the ESP size.
> 
> No complexity and and there are no complaints in millions of users!

Millions of users don't install Windows or OS X; they get it installed
for them. And have you looked at what *other* partitioning options
Windows gives you? just about zip. zero. none. If we could get away with
an installer that simple, we could do a lot more magical whizzy stuff,
yes. But it seems fairly clear that we can't (though I'd be all in
favour of it - anything for a quiet life).

> But it is precisely this type of hysterically unnecessary
> customization creep that has made Custom Partitioning the event
> horizon for QA testing. We will never ever test most let alone all
> combinations in Custom Partitioning because of shit just like this.

It's not really customization creep: newUI gives you slightly less space
than oldUI did. For entirely selfish reasons I'm all for an installer
that's a grey box with a green GO button, but I don't think that'd
exactly fly with the established Fedora/RHEL user base (remember
anaconda is a shared component).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net