Genes Lists <lists@sapience.com> wrote:
On 7/18/23 09:45, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
I don't install my kernels on a fat partition without UNIX privileges. IOW if it should be required that the efi partition is a fat partition, I wonder why this is recommended.
OI assume a part of your comment is the security aspect. This of course can be addressed by UKI and secure boot for example.
I'll let you peruse the references for more info. But one thing that comes to mind is - its simpler.
Simpler in the sense that the UEFI boot process needs to be able to read the XBOOTLDR partition to load the kernel - this in turn only works if there are available EFI file system drivers which in turn must be installed (see package efifs).
Not a big deal
Last time I tried, which was long ago, pacman -S efifs worked. What failed for me was getting the efi bios, or efi shells, to load it. Which could be due to my incompetence. Or using an old, no longer supported, PC. Though that particular experiment was not with a very old PC. Or whatever. -- u34
but these drivers need to keep pace appropriately with the actual "kernel" drivers; at least to some degree. These efi drivers are separate from the in-tree kernel drivers of course.
Indeed efi filesys drivers are available for common filesystems including ext4 and btrfs.
By contrast, there are no EFI drivers available for md raid, so that cannot be used for /boot mounted as XBOOTLDR partion.
gene