On 24/01/2024 10:17, Nicolas George wrote:
Hi.We have drives in mdadm RAID1. Since they are potential boot drives, we have to put a GPT on them. Since mdadm can only put its superblock at the end of the device (1.0), at the beginning of the device (1.1) and 4 Ko from the beginning (1.2), but they still have not invented 1.3 to have the metadata 17 Ko from the beginning or the end, which would be necessary to be compatible with GPT, we have to partition them and put the EFI system partition outside them. To keep things logical, we have the same partitions on all drives, including the EFI one. And GRUB is perfectly capable of booting the system (inside the LVM) inside the RAID inside the partition. Which leads me to wonder if there is an automated way to install GRUB on all the EFI partitions.
Possibly. Proxmox (the virtualisation environment built on top of Debian, so not actually Debian itself) have a tool they imaginatively call "proxmox-boot-tool". It's designed to keep ESPs synchronized when you have ZFS on several disks. ZFS (on linux, at least) always creates a partition table, even if you allocate a whole disk as a zvol, so at least that solves the problem of where to put the ESP. However, proxmox-boot-tool registers itself as a hook and, when you update the kernel, it will kick in and re-run grub-install on each device.
You might be able to persuade the good people at Proxmox to release their tool upstream (i.e. into Debian).
The manual way is not that bad, but automated would be nice. Regards,
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