rfc: EFI System partition, FAT32, repair and non-persistent mount

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-03-18 at 17:27 -0700, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 5:19 PM, Lennart Poettering
>> <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
>> > On Tue, 18.03.14 15:07, Chris Murphy (lists at colorremedies.com) wrote:
>> >
>> >> > Fedora takes a different approach though, and will mount an explicit
>> >> > boot partition to /boot and the ESP to /boot/efi, and do so
>> >> > unconditionally without involving autofs.  Fedora could add
>> >> > "x-systemd-automount" to the mount options of /boot/efi, and thus
>> >> > turning /boot/efi into an autofs too.
>> >>
>> >> When I add x-systemd.automount to fstab for /boot/efi, it still gets
>> >> mounted on every boot.
>> >
>> > Ah, yeah sorry, forgot to mention, you need to also add "noauto" to the
>> > line. If it is "auto" we'll still wait for the mount unit to complete.
>> >
>> > Basically, combining x-systemd.automount + auto is just a away to speed
>> > up boot by fscking in the bg while the mount point is already
>> > established. After boot the file system will be mounted as if
>> > x-systemd.automount hadn't been used.
>> >
>> > Combining x-systemd.automount + noauto however is a way to establish a
>> > mount point and only lazily triggering it on access. And that's what you
>> > want to use here.
>>
>> It seems like 'ls /boot/efi' shouldn't be enough to trigger a mount --
>> the poi nt is that /boot/efi should stay unmounted unless there's a
>> genuine need to mount it.  So just plain noauto might be good enough
>> here (i.e. without the automount).
>
> Um. What? How would it then get automounted?
>

Exactly.  What needs it to automount and why?  Isn't Chris's main
point that Fedora shouldn't neet to mount the ESP in the first place?

I can see an argument for (auto)mounting it readonly, though.


> You need 'noauto' to tell systemd not to mount it on boot, and
> 'x-systemd-automount' (when did that change from
> 'comment=systemd.automount'?) to tell systemd to automount it on access.
> --
> Adam Williamson
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