On Sun, 2012-11-04 at 03:29 +0100, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> On 11/04/2012 02:50 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Sun, 2012-11-04 at 02:36 +0100, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> >
> >> Also what does this mean for UEFI installations with Fedora? When I install
> >> F18 will it detect that the UEFI bits already exists on the harddisk and
> >> overwrite only the binary bits and only add the new install to the grub menu?
> >
> > What the current code does is, if you have an existing Fedora entry in
> > the UEFI boot manager, simply erase it and write a new entry. I haven't
> > checked recently what it does with the EFI system partition, but it does
> > not re-use the previous copy of grub(2)-efi.
>
> But what happens to the files in \EFI\redhat specifically grub.conf? Will
> this just be updated or overwritten (thus killing the entry for the
> previous release)?
Like I said, I haven't tested recently enough to be 100% sure. My guess
is that they either just get blown away and rewritten - they're actually
owned by the grub2-efi package - or that anaconda creates a second EFI
system partition and you wind up with two. I think it did that at one
point, but I don't know if it still does. In general, multiple UEFI
installs is just not a case that we've covered very well yet. With the
current state of Fedora's support, you're just better off sticking to
one Fedora install at a time and giving the installer a nice clean slate
to work with when you reinstall. One Fedora install per disk is as far
as you can push it without having to start fixing stuff up manually, I'd
guess.
> >> While I get that BIOS stuff needs to be supported for a while I think
> >> supporting UEFI multiboot would simplify things because you can separate
> >> the installations completely rather than having to deal with updating
> >> existing boot structures that could potentially break stuff.
> >
> > They're really separate topics and don't need to be considered in
> > relation to each other.
>
> What I was aiming at was that currently in order to install a new Fedora
> release next to the old one the data in \EFI\redhat needs to be modified
> carefully to add the new stuff but also keep the old config intact.
> With proper UEFI multiboot support each release could create a directory
> \EFI\fedora${releasever} and install the bootloader there with a fresh
> grub.conf only for that release. Since there is no shared data between the
> two Fedora version no breakage can happen with the update of grub.efi or
> grub.conf.
> The user can then directly boot into both release from the UEFI boot menu
> rather then first having to select "Fedora" from the UEFI menu and then
> again select between the releases from the grub menu.
I understand how it could work in theory, yes. I'm on record as saying
that UEFI's bootloader design is a deal saner than BIOS's, and should
enable much better multiboot co-operation between OSes in an ideal
world. It's just not something we currently support very well in
practice.
BTW, a directory named after the release version wouldn't be a very good
idea, because it'd get very confusing if you did upgrades, and it
precludes multiple installs of the same release. It'd probably be best
to use some kind of unique identifier.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net
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