On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 2:46 PM Samuel Sieb <samuel@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > The /boot partition can be anywhere. I generally don't even create a > separate partition, it's just included in /. But if you're wanting to > share it, it would need to be separate. Or mount Fedora n-1 root (somewhere in /run ?) and then bind mount its boot directory to /boot. Frankenfstab? I mean, yeah, you want a separate boot volume if you want grub to have a big picture view of multiple Fedoras; or for that matter any other distro that conforms to bootloaderspec. The reality is the interoperability of bootloaderspec has problems. Similar to GRUB upstream, Fedora's 200+ patches rather makes it like a Fedora specific fork; whereas the bootloaderspec is not exactly implemented by Fedora either. Arguably Fedora's implementation is a superset of the original, because kernel packages detect the use of sd-boot somehow, and will write the bls *conf files to the EFI system volume, which is where sd-boot expects them. Whereas our GRUB blscfg.mod (not upstreamed) will see them most anywhere, I think, which is actually mainly a GRUB feature because it can read files across multiple physical devices. sd-boot does not, and bootloaderspec follows that lineage, where the kernel+initramfs+bootloader *conf files, all exist on the same volume with no way to reference any other volume. > > > So, couldn't there be a utility, which when the user points it at an > > alternate installation, it creates a link in the boot volume with > > priority. The way grub(1) used to do with the configfile entry. > > You can still do that. Even with BLS I would expect you could add an > entry in the static part of the grub.cfg to point to the other installation. Yes, you can do that in grub.cfg - strictly speaking it should be done with either 40_custom or 41_custom so that if you did regenerate grub.cfg with grub-mkconfig, you'd still get your 'configfile' forwarder in the new grub.cfg instead of stepping on it. > >> Another gotcha is on UEFI, the older Fedora during software updates > >> will (rarely) need to update the bootloader which will step on the > >> binary files in /boot/efi/EFI/fedora, which isn't the end of the world > >> but it's probably better if the old Fedora /etc/fstab is modified to > >> remove the automount of /boot/efi so that the EFI System partition > >> isn't ever updated except by the new Fedora. > > > > For a single large boot directory for all OSs on the system, couldn't > > there be a directory for each OS, allowing for both update and a > > boot selection screen (a menu of available OSs). > > Probably, but you would somehow have to convince each OS install to > update its own part. The EFI system partition location EFI/fedora where we put bootloaders and grub.cfg is basically hardwired. There isn't a way to rename it, e.g. EFI/fedora30 and EFI/fedora31 and keep all the bootloader stuff separate. At least not that I'm aware of - I mean, anything is possible, how invasive that is I have no idea. The advantage of Fedora's variant of bootloader spec is regardless of UEFI or BIOS, the bootloader menu entries are in the same place: /boot/loader/entries which is on the boot volume mounted at /boot. If you do custom installation on UEFI and BIOS to use a directory instead of separate boot, it's still /boot/loader/entries which happens to be on the root volume mounted at / - so it's the same, BIOS or UEFI. This kinda gets us away from the confusion of UEFI's grub.cfg being in a different place than on BIOS (which is still true with BLS feature, but grub.cfg is now a static file that we don't really care about anymore in the typical case; so most conversations about menu entries and boot parameters don't need to be firmware specific until you get suspicious the problem relates to it. -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ test mailing list -- test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to test-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
