I didn't read the full conversion -> it's possbile I miss some importent parts of the discussion.
But if already on UEFI systems, I realy like unified kernel images (UKI). A single "stand-alone" binary for the system. On multiboot systems, one binary for each system (full seperation). The "bootmanager" is the UEFI itself, configurable by the uefi setting tool of the mainboard or efibootmgr. I think most of the current tool-chains use systemd-efistub but in theory, it should work with a pure kernel too. But the systemd-efibstub add some nice features and will still work with a "alpine only" system as its independet of the final loaded system. On Sep. 15 2026, at 8:31 pm, Ralf Mardorf <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 2026-09-15 at 13:21 -0400, Genes Lists wrote: > > I strongly favor bootctl (over grub) > > David actually uses Syslinux. I did that too, but I had to switch > because Syslinux stopped working, at that point, I was forced to switch > to GRUB (with a clear, human-readable, handwritten configuration). > > I used to do it this way whenever I had to switch from old to new > hardware: screwdriver and tweak the graphics drivers, and if something > was brand new, maybe add a kernel module for the network chip or > something like that. Maybe I had to reinstall the same bootloader. > > If you're already forced to migrate from legacy BIOS to UEFI, then I > think you should handle it in such a way that you can revert to the old > approach afterward, so that in the future, you'll only need a > screwdriver and to tweak a few modules again. I find it bizarre to link > the bootloader to the init system. They simply don’t belong together. > > I would never consider using systemd as a bootloader. What if, for > example, I wanted to delete everything except my Alpine Linux > installation one day? Alpine Linux doesn't support systemd, so I'd have > to set everything up from scratch again. I think a bootloader should be > like a portable script. > > On Tue, 2026-09-15 at 10:26 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote: > > In my case /boot (not /mnt/boot/) it looks like this > > I wrote something nonsensical here, what I meant to say was that my root > directory / on a partition contains virtually everything, including the > boot directory, so the boot directory isn't a separate partition. Only > the EFI partition is a separate partition, which doesn't even need to be > mounted. And, of course, I have separate data partitions. >
