[systemd-devel] Splitting sd-boot from systemd/bootctl for enabling sd-boot in Fedora

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mo, 09.05.22 10:35, Neal Gompa (ngompa13 at gmail.com) wrote:

> > I am pretty sure the answer to this is not to make choice of boot
> > loaders configurable, but making them adhere to a common definition
> > how boot menu entries are defined, so that it doesn't matter which
> > boot loader you are using, the menu items pop up correctly either way.
> >
> > i.e. if boot loaders would all implement
> > https://systemd.io/BOOT_LOADER_SPECIFICATION then there would be a
> > very clear way how without trampling on each other's feet multi-boot
> > would work...
>
> Has there been a campaign to get them to do it? Any outreach? Posting
> a page on the internet doesn't exactly do anything to get people to
> adopt a spec.

There was some. I even wrote a patch for Grub and posted it. But there
was no positive feedback on that, so we dropped the ball. Back then,
grub development was also kinda dead, so it wasn't surprising...

It takes a lot of energy and dedication to fight this through if you
have no stakes in the community you are trying to convince and that
community isn't the most healthy on the planet in the first place — in
particular if you don't actually intend to run their code
yourself. And that's really how Grub is to us...

Besides grub no other boot loader really mattered, as it's pretty much
the only boot loader big distros use. Was back then, and still is.

I think the Fedora patch for boot loader spec support in grub might
actually based on my original work in one way or another, but I am not
sure, i never looked at it anymore... To my knowledge that fedora
patch never made it upstream though, even though it has been shipped
for a long time in fedora? (given the patch extended boot loader spec
to become a templating language which I think is not precisely a wise
choice I'd rather not be associated with that work though...)

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Berlin