On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 11:14 AM, G <garboge@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Thanks to everyone involved in development and/or support of mdadm. I've > been using it for years on legacy hardware! > > I've had to resort to additional devices (USB, additional drives, etc) for > /boot in order to use un-partitioned block devices for raid. > > I now want to use un-partitioned block devices on an Intel S5500HCV server > board with UEFI. > > Is it possible to use UEFI boot without an EFI partition but have it boot a > Linux kernel (Ubuntu server) directly using EFI stub and use un-partitioned > raided drives? How does the firmware find the kernel? Generally it's expected the firmware finds the kernel via an NVRAM entry pointing to a partition and path to file, and via FAT support to locate the actual blocks for the file. If you use mdadm metadata format 1.0, which goes at the end of the unpartitioned drive, and then partition and format the array - it will appear to the UEFI firmware to not be a RAID member but a normally partitioned drive. Ergo it can only be RAID 1, or this isn't going to work. Previously on this list, tricking the firmware with metadata format 0.9 or 1.0 to achieve this is frowned upon, as the layout and usage is ambiguous, and there's no assurance the firmware will never write to the EFI System partition: and if it were to do so, you'd have out of sync member devices on which a scrub would show an unresolvable mismatch. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
