[systemd-devel] How to factory reset?

[Kay Sievers]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Kay Sievers <kay at vrfy.org> wrote:

>> The "all included" kernels are found at /boot/EFI/Linux/*.efi
>
> Yeah until the distros stop persistently mounting the ESP, I'm not a
> fan at all of anything but the most minimalist approach to the ESP.

Systemd by default mounts it with autofs, it will not be mounted until
it is accessed, which does not happen during normal operation. We
currently miss autofs timeout handling, which would umount /boot again
when it is no longer used. That would make stuff pretty robust, I
expect.

It's just that distros have their rather broken concept of putting it
into fstab, and even cascading mounts with splitting /boot and the
ESP.

> The FAT kernel maintainer says it's a bad idea, pretty much any crash
> or panic while the ESP is mounted, even ro, can cause FAT corruption
> and there's nothing to be done about it (well, fsck it at every boot
> might help some, which also some distros don't ever do).

Right, the Linux FAT driver, or maybe just the way Linux handles the
writeback to disk, is absolutely fragile. Corrupted FAT file systems
are the norm and not the exception. We must mount it unconditionally,
it will just break after a while.

Kay