[systemd-devel] Antw: [EXT] Re: [systemd‑devel] Splitting sd‑boot from systemd/bootctl for enabling sd‑boot in Fedora

[Ulrich Windl]

>>> Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> schrieb am 27.04.2022 um 18:04
in
Nachricht <Ymlpe2sXpNELVKjC at gardel-login>:
> On Mi, 27.04.22 11:10, Neal Gompa (ngompa13 at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
>> > Rebooting from the DE has advantages: nice UI without much work, l10n,
>> > accessibility, help, integration with normal auth mechanisms (e.g.
polkit
>> > auth for non‑default boot entries or firmware setup), no need to
>> > fiddle with pressing keys at the exactly right time.
>>
>> It also has a major downside that in the event the OS doesn't boot,
>> you don't have a friendly way to do recovery.
> 
> What does "recovery" precisely mean for you? I mean, on Linux this
> usually means you'll be dumped at a login prompt/shell in one way or
> another. How does it matter whether you first showed a graphical icon
> in that case?
> 
>> Nowadays both Windows and macOS provide graphical boot managers and
>> graphical tools/environments for recovery. These are both things I
>> want in Fedora as well.
> 
> Well, it sounds backwards to focus on the boot loader UI side of
> "recovery" so much if you don't even have any reasonably thing you
> could do in case of recovery better than a login prompt/shell...

Well, not the shell, the tools are important:
Before systemd I could easily recover as system that failed booting (at some
init stage), because I could easily mount the root filesystem and the tools
were there.
With systemd I have a crippled minimum emergency environment where almost all
required tools are absent (just es the real fstab is). That's one of the first
and biggest frustrations with systemd.

> 
> Quite frankly, I think we should actually focus on real improvements
> to recovery stuff, i.e. boot counting/automatic fallback on failed
> boots. which sd‑boot all implements btw, in conjunction with systemd

At the current state of AI, I'd prefer manual recovery over any "automatic".
Last time I had permitted Windows to try automatic recovery, it messed up the
system so severely that I had to restore from backup.
(Only the AHCI mode was lost after a drained BIOS battery).

> userspace. That kind of stuff makes whole sets of problems go away
> entirely, and is *actually* helpful. Whether we first show a graphical
> icon or just a text before we dump you in a shell prompt once all is
> lost anyway is kinda a pointless discussion if you ask me.

fsck, only tring to fix obvious non-controversial issues automatically, but
require manual mode otherwise proved to be a very successful approach over the
years.
Sill users could run with the "-y" option to get "something" that might work,
but still probably loosing some data that could be recovered otherwise.

> 
> For me recovery means something very different than graphical icons I
> must say.

Sadly, today many users judge from the look of the icons, not from the tools
behind.
(If you ever followed Android's syslog, you know what I mean... ;-)

Regards,
Ulrich