[systemd-devel] How to factory reset?

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 9:39 PM, Andrei Borzenkov <arvidjaar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Windows bootloader configuration is stored on ESP; of course it is not
> changed often. Also Windows still needs to update bootloader every
> now and then.

I'm not seeing a BCD on the ESP, that's usually on NTFS historically
anyway. I see bootmgfw.efi, and bootmgr.efi.

> This is actually quite similar to secure boot with grub2
> used by Linux today where only pointer to /boot need to be set.

Right, with a grub.cfg using configfile on the ESP to point to a
"real" grub.cfg, or BLS snippets, on /boot. Or even better would be
dynamic discovery similar to gummiboot, rEFInd, and the built-in boot
manager in Apple's firmware (talk about something that's very rarely
updated).

> As
> neither binary nor grub.cfg snippet normally change we probably could
> skip even that after initial installation.

Yes I'd like to see GRUB on the ESP be totally generic, except for an
installer created grub.cfg that merely forwards to the real one on
/boot. Then it's on a more reliable fs, it can be mirrored, and that
one is always updated when there are kernel upgrades, rather than the
one on the ESP. openSUSE does this already, maybe also Ubuntu. Fedora
doesn't, it's main grub.cfg is on the ESP and that's the one always
modified whenever kernels are installed, and since Fedora gets lots of
kernel updates, this file is always being modified. I've tried to
encourage a different strategy!
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1048999


-- 
Chris Murphy