On Mon, Jul 06, 2020 at 08:06:05PM -0600, Chris Murphy wrote: > On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 4:48 PM Gerald Henriksen <ghenr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > So if one has a spare partition to play with btrfs, is there an easy > > way to install a second copy of Fedora without having the /boot/efi/ > > entries overwrite the existing Fedora installation? Or fix it to have > > 2 separate entries after the fact? > > It's possible but has challenges. Separate ESP's you'll need to either > (a) use the firmware's built-in boot manager to choose what will > probably appear to be identically named Fedora's (b) add new NVRAM > entries, and names, and switch between them before reboot by using > efibootmgr --bootorder or --bootnext. > > Another option is shared ESP and /boot but my vague recollection is > some things go away. For sure /boot/efi/EFI/fedora is replaced, and > then possibly /boot/loader/entries are replaced. But that might be > easier to deal with than the above, and more efficient.
This is so sad. Boot Loader Specification was explicitly designed to support parallel installations on a single ESP. (The case of different systems was the goal, but the general logic works for different installations of the same system as well.) BLS entries are stored underneath $ESP/<machine-id>, so different Fedora installations which have different machine-id numbers simply don't conflict. sd-boot just displays the combined list. If two entries happen to be *exactly* the same — same os name, same os version, same kernel version — it'll use the machine-id in the entry title to disambiguate them to the user (*). There is really no reason for this not to work. If are considering separate ESPs and efibootmgr to switch between them then something went rather wrong somewhere. (*) If there are two installations with overlapping kernel versions, the UI is not going to be great, because there will be entries like Fedora 33 (Workstation) 5.11.21-23.fc33.amd64 08a5690a2eed47cf92ac0a5d2e3cf6b0 Fedora 33 (Workstation) 5.11.21-23.fc33.amd64 949499494994999393939ad2ad99ffff Fedora 33 (Workstation) 5.10.11-18.fc33.amd64 08a5690a2eed47cf92ac0a5d2e3cf6b0 Fedora 33 (Workstation) 5.10.11-18.fc33.amd64 949499494994999393939ad2ad99ffff i.e. the entries for the two installations will be interleaved. So the user needs to remember that e.g. 08a5690a2eed47cf92ac0a5d2e3cf6b0 is the installation with ext4 and 949499494994999393939ad2ad99ffff the one with btrfs. Zbyszek _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
