[arch-general] boot magically mounted on startup; reliable?

[Vasile Vilvoiu]

Hello!

On my latest install I forgot to mount the boot partition during the 
installation process, which prompted me to come back on a few of the 
steps after setting up the root filesystem.

Everything works great (with systemd-boot) but I just remembered one 
thing I missed was adding an entry in fstab for /boot. However, it does 
seem that systemd does mount _something_ automatically:

$ mount | grep boot
systemd-1 on /boot type autofs 
(rw,relatime,fd=50,pgrp=1,timeout=120,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=10794)

and that _something_ seems to be the same as the boot partition:

$ sudo ls -al /boot
total 58408
drwx------  5 root root     4096 Jan  1  1970  .
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root     4096 Jul  9 11:02  ..
drwx------  5 root root     4096 Jul  9 10:54  EFI
drwx------  2 root root     4096 Jul  9 21:55 'System Volume Information'
-rwx------  1 root root 34938914 Jul 19 18:14  initramfs-linux-fallback.img
-rwx------  1 root root  9030240 Jul 19 18:14  initramfs-linux.img
-rwx------  1 root root  5174272 May 10 21:27  intel-ucode.img
drwx------  3 root root     4096 Jul 26 08:47  loader
-rwx------  1 root root 10636800 Jul 19 18:14  vmlinuz-linux

$ sudo mount /dev/nvme1n1p1 /mnt

$ sudo ls -al /mnt
total 58408
drwx------  5 root root     4096 Jan  1  1970  .
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root     4096 Jul  9 11:02  ..
drwx------  5 root root     4096 Jul  9 10:54  EFI
drwx------  2 root root     4096 Jul  9 21:55 'System Volume Information'
-rwx------  1 root root 34938914 Jul 19 18:14  initramfs-linux-fallback.img
-rwx------  1 root root  9030240 Jul 19 18:14  initramfs-linux.img
-rwx------  1 root root  5174272 May 10 21:27  intel-ucode.img
drwx------  3 root root     4096 Jul 26 08:47  loader
-rwx------  1 root root 10636800 Jul 19 18:14  vmlinuz-linux


I have trouble finding the documentation of this behavior and I'd like 
to know if it can be relied upon or I should add an entry manually.

-- 
Best regards,
Vasile Vilvoiu