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

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 19, 2014, at 7:02 AM, Lennart Poettering <mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> It's one of the reasons why I really really dislike the invention of
> /boot/efi as the mount point for the ESP…


I agree, although I go farther. The EFI System partition doesn't scale, isn't resilient, can neither be mirrored nor easily sync'd (multidevice boot). It should be considered a pre-boot and OS installer domain only.

Are bootloader updates necessary? On BIOS this is ignored, no updates effectively happen, even if the grub package is update, grub2-install isn't invoked so no update really occurs to the bootloader.

On UEFI it's the opposite. An updated grub-efi package causes grub<arch>.efi to be overwritten, and invoking grub2-install will break Secure Boot systems.

If UEFI bootloader updates are considered necessary then we need a better way than assuming there's only one ESP, by only updating the one at /boot/efi. Because that's not necessarily the one being executed by the firmware. The bootloader RPM would need to mount all ESP's on the system, replace-existing, unmount.

So whether yes/no to bootloader updates, /boot/efi either isn't needed or doesn't meet the requirements.


Chris Murphy