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

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 3:53 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 19.03.14 13:13, Chris Murphy (lists at colorremedies.com) wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> You know, the ESP is actually FAT, one of the simplest, best-understood,
> most used, and most stable file systems around. Sure, one can always
> break things, but it is simply misguided to believe that this is the
> part that will likely break and that we really really really need to
> stay away from, and not the later parts of the boot that involve grub
> and raid, and yuck.
>
> You know, by creating a chain of many steps where you first go for
> the ESP, and then follow that by another boot partition and so on, you
> just make things more complex.

More complex than trying to mirror a FAT ESP partition across multiple
boot disks, keeping it properly synchronized, because RAID isn't
supported?

Grub 1 on MD RAID actually just works, once you figure out the
incantation to install it.  It would be a shame if that ability got
lost in the name of simplicity.