[systemd-devel] "bootctl install" on mdadm raid 1 fails

[Lennart Poettering]

On Do, 14.12.17 22:17, Michael Chapman (mike at very.puzzling.org) wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Dec 2017, Bjørn Forsman wrote:
> > On 9 December 2017 at 06:56, Andrei Borzenkov <arvidjaar at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > Firmware is unaware of MD RAID and each partition is individually and
> > > independently writable by firmware.
> > 
> > 1. "Firmware is unaware of MD RAID". I agree.
> > 2. "... independently writable by firmware". I don't expect firmware
> > to _write_ to the ESP (does it?!). As long as it only reads, nothing
> > will get out of sync.
> 
> It's perhaps unlikely for firmware itself to write to the ESP, but certainly
> anything launched from the firmware can. One of my boot entries is an EFI
> shell, and it can move, copy, read and write files within the ESP.
> 
> I think it's probably wise to avoid software RAID for the ESP.

I think so too. There has been work to teach sd-boot "boot attempt
counting", to make chrome-os-like automatic upgrading with safe
fallback when the system continously fails to boot available. That too
would store the counts in the file system.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat