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

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Andrew Lutomirski <luto at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Sure, UEFI has the capability, but it's not going to be used when simply
>> booting the system normally. All the firmware does in that case is mount
>> the partition and execute the bootloader it finds there.
>
> Why not?  It's completely safe when the OS is Mac OS or Windows.  It's
> sometimes safe when the OS is Linux.  It's even possibly useful: you
> might want to have an ESP bootloader, shim, or whatever that logs
> errors.  I bet there's at least one UEFI firmware out there that backs
> up settings to ESP and/or backs up a whole firmware image to ESP.
>
> It would be a shame for a Linux "RAID" install to corrupt the ESP just
> because you did something unusual in various UEFI menus.

The standard EFI Shell can do exactly this.  It has commands like
'edit' and 'mkdir'.  I think that using them should not cause
filesystem corruption.

--Andy