On 12/6/23 10:32, Peter Humphreey wrote:
Hello list,
I have a new toy to play with - an Intel NUC with i5 (16 threads in all) and
1TB superfast M2 SSD. I grew tired of the noise and thirst of my Amari machine
and I wanted something quiet and frugal, so now I'm building a new Gentoo
system on it. I want to use bootctl from systemd-boot, as usual, to give me a
boot menu without that grub monster.
The installation guides on the Web have been developed since I last had a new
machine, and they attempt to show how boot and EFI partitions should be laid
out, but there's a problem.
In particular, the Gentoo wiki says I must have an EFI partition of type esp
[1] - not a directory in, say, /boot, as my other machines have. All right so
far, but the Gentoo systemd-boot page says I need a /boot partition as well,
of type XBOOTLDR [2]. So now I seem to need /efi on /dev/nvme0n1p1 and /boot on
/dev/nvme0n1p2, both with FAT32 file systems.
In fact those two guides contradict each other. One says I must have a boot
partition, the other that I don't need one on a modern system.
Quandary: if I believe both guides I finish up with both partitions, and then
'bootctl install' is happy, but the usual make && make modules-install && make
install sequence ends up with no kernel in either partition.
I'm getting sawdust under my fingernails.
Has anyone some advice for me?
1.https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/
Disks#What_is_the_EFI_System_Partition_.28ESP.29.3F
2.https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd/systemd-boot#Pre_Deployment_Considerations
Based on an earlier post in the other thread about booting issues, and
not having read the actual docs, it sounds like if you have /efi mounted
as type esp, /boot can just be a directory in whatever is mounted at /;
it no longer needs to be a separate partition.
The way I think of it is that the UEFI firmware needs to find the
xxxx.efi loader, and it can only read FAT32 formatted partitions
labelled as type esp. That xxxx.efi loader then needs to find your
kernel and related files, but as it is specific for that type of kernel
(linux) it can know about more partition formatting options. I suspect
that many (most?/all?) existing linux utilities still expect the boot
dir to be at /boot, but perhaps the docs are late to change describing
that it no longer needs to be a separate partition, or perhaps one or
more of those utilities still requires a partition.
Hopefully this isn't too far off base.
Jack
