[systemd-devel] [PATCH 2/2] fsck: Add support for EFI variable based fsck indication

[Kay Sievers]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 9:15 AM, Jan Janssen <medhefgo at web.de> wrote:
>> Gesendet: Sonntag, 15. März 2015 um 19:58 Uhr

>> Nobody would write to the flash on kernel updates, we only possibly
>> write to the ESP filesystem. The flash is not meant for such use
>> cases, it is known to brick all sorts of machines, and not to be
>> mis-used for such features.

> As far as I remember, the bricking mainly happened because the kernel was
> writing kilobytes (maybe megabytes) worth of crashdumbs. This feature only
> touches a couple of bytes.

I have a machine that refuses accept any more variable setup just
after committing many small variable changes. It is probably the
garbage collection or anything in the simple flash storage management
that goes wrong. It can only be reset by resetting the entire firmware
to the defaults in the firmware menu, sometimes only after a couple of
tries.
The EFI variable storage is better left alone and not to be used for
anything else than the boot loader or at installation time.

The reboot-to-firmware sounds ok, there might be no other way of doing
that on EFI, it is a firmware specific task, "normal" services should
not start using
EFI for configuration.

> Though, I do see the other reservations against this. Though, someone might
> wanna close https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88330 then.

Changed the subject and added a comment.

Thanks,
Kay