[arch-general] UEFI madness

Jan Steffens jan.steffens at gmail.com
Sat Mar 2 21:15:49 EST 2013


On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 2:30 AM, David Benfell <benfell at parts-unknown.org> wrote:
>
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> On 03/02/2013 03:31 AM, Mika Fischer wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Jan Steffens <jan.steffens at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> With the
>>> ESP at /boot, pacman automatically installs the kernels where they
>>> need to be, and no ugly copying hacks are necessary.
>>
>> Do you mean something other than "/boot/vmlinuz-linux" by "where they
>> need to be"? Because that location is not really ideal. To avoid
>> conflicts with other operating systems the kernels should go into an
>> OS-specific subdirectory on the ESP (i.e. /boot/arch/vmlinuz-linux or
>> even /boot/EFI/arch/vmlinuz-linux, I never quite understood what the
>> EFI directory is there for...).
> As it happens, this system will *only* be dual-boot with Windows, so
> Jan's suggestion works fine with no conflict, but yes, this gave me
> pause. I think if I were experimenting with multiple distributions or
> some BSDs, however, I'd definitely need to do something more like what
> Mika suggested.

It's what our default loader/entries/arch.conf uses. Of course, it's
suboptimal when booting multiple installs.

When booting with at least systemd 198, kernel 3.8, and gummiboot 11,
the ESP will be mounted at /boot by default. No fstab configuration
necessary. Having a non-empty /boot or a configured mount disables
this feature.

The systemd guys are cooking up a kernel-install tool which installs
the kernels into an installation-specific subdirectory in /boot (based
on machine-id) and automatically writes loader entries for them. I
hope we can make use of this in the future.


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