On EFI: F18 is rendered unbootable after installing F19

[Chris Murphy]

On May 19, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:

> 
> There isn't an explicit criterion, no. I filed a bug on this long ago,
> but from a different angle: I was figuring we should be creating
> separate *EFI* boot manager entries for each Fedora install. That was
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=759303 , and was closed as
> WONTFIX by Jesse with the comment "Not a scenario we're going to
> support." So this was basically 'by design', before.

The way I read that, the anaconda team is saying "we're stuck with the limitations of GRUB2, and we're not going to go down the road of sacrificing chickens to make this work." I think that's reasonable.


> But your way of
> looking at it may be the better one, and an easier (and less likely to
> break, with all this NVRAM crap) way of supporting multiple UEFI Fedora
> installs on a single machine.

Well, I don't know if it's better. I'm only suggesting the clunky presentation for other systems should work rather than face plant. 

I think my top gripe about GRUB on EFI is that is has no mechanism to do the obvious thing a substitute EFI boot manager needs to do: scan the ESP for candidate boot loaders, and present those options in a consistent UI. Today its menu is still static, based on one distribution's configuration file for grub. And this is why there's still this litany of users floating around who want to use grub legacy with its simpler conf format, and are willing to multiboot by using one grub to chain load another grub to chain load a boot loader and then an OS. It's like, Rube Goldberg might have gone just one level more indirect by somehow involving one or two cats to the boot loading process.


> 
> Given the fact that the current state is really bad, and the proposed
> fix seems like it can't affect other scenarios or make the affected
> scenario any worse than it is at present, I'd probably +1 the FE
> proposal.


We'll see what pjones says about it. Maybe it's more invasive than I'm imagining, but it seems whatever part of the mkconfig scripts identify the current system as EFI and create entries using linuxefi initrdefi, isn't doing this for other linuxes including a prior Fedora. Fixing that shouldn't be too difficult. Another s word.


Chris Murphy