[systemd-devel] why does bootctl default to /boot and not to /boot/efi?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 01.06.16 19:53, Chris Murphy (lists at colorremedies.com) wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 2:46 AM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> > Lennart Poettering wrote on 30/05/16 17:47:
> >> hence an acceptable alternatively might be to
> >> introduce /efi and mount the esp there, and simply not have /boot on
> >> legacy free systems.
> >
> > This might be the pragmatic way to get this schema more widely adopted.
> > kernel-install could be modified to detect which is used and copy the
> > kernel to the appropriate directory (or copy it to both).
> >
> > I really like the ESP as /boot approach but it's hard to get people to
> > buy into it :(
> 
> Well it's a non-starter for dual boot because the existing Windows and
> OS X ESP's are too small to host kernels, and I'm not aware of any
> installer that'll create an additional ESP or grow an existing one.

I never had a problem with that. On my system Windows 10 allocated
256MB for the ESP and I only have 85 MB of that used with two
kernels. It's a vendor-installed Windows (Lenovo).

> Next, it rather seems like rearranging the deck chairs. There's no
> major advantage. The boot manager gets a bit smaller but now it's
> mandatory to put the kernel and initramfs on the ESP, unlike any other
> OS. You get to drop the 500MB ext4 /boot, but now you have to have a
> 500MB or possibly larger, FAT32 /boot, in order to hold 4 kernels and
> initramfs's. When those initramfs's are the nohostonly or reproducible
> variety, they're currently 50MB on Fedora 24.

On my Fedora 24 they are ~30M each. Which means at the Windows default
of 256M, and 25M of that used by Windows I can still install ~5
kernels or so...

> So kernel+system.map+initramfs = ~60MB which is ~60x bigger than
> most boot managers. And some use cases will want posix permissions
> and xattr support, which is lacking on FAT; and still others that
> will want the initramfs at least on an encrypted volume.

sd-boot certainly requires none of that.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat