On Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:47:26 +0000
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 11:53:16AM -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 11:43 AM Chris Murphy <[email protected]> 
> > wrote:
> > > On Mon, Oct 13, 2025, at 10:20 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > > > On Do, 09.10.25 14:51, Chris Murphy ([email protected]) wrote:
> > > >> Boot Loader Spec [1] says, verbatim
> > > >>
> > > >> "ESP must — and the MBR boot and GPT XBOOTLDR partition should — be a 
> > > >> file system readable by the firmware"
> > > >>
> > > >> XBOOTLDR is permitted by the spec to be any file system.
> > > >>
> > > >> ESP and BOOTLDR are not required to be writeable by the firmware.
> > > >
> > > > Well, sure, we allowed some flexibility there, but made the intention
> > > > clear, no?
> > >
> > > Super clear. Non-FAT XBOOTLDR is permitted. Non-FAT EFI file system 
> > > drivers to provide firmware-level support for a file system, is permitted.
> > >
> > > If Boot Loader Spec aims to constrain the UEFI spec, then it needs to use 
> > > language that does that.
> > >
> > > >Of course, I regret having granted the flexibility, that
> > > > was a mistake.
> > >
> > > What about fixing the spec to reflect this?
> > >
> > > Because then the present behavior is a legitimately a bug and can be 
> > > reverted to use the generic Linux partition type GUID, or something else. 
> > > And stop proliferating non-FAT XBOOTLDR.
> > >
> > 
> > If that happened, then we'd permanently diverge and stop attempting to
> > follow the spec for bootloader configuration.
> > 
> > Remember that BLS is implemented in GRUB and ZIPL, both are used on
> > non-UEFI architectures.
> 
> What filesystem is used for them there?

on s390x with ZIPL it can be any filesystem, the userspace zipl tool
creates a (disk) block list in /boot/bootmap file when adding a new boot
entry, the blocklist is then used by the actual bootloader. It merges
the BLS snippets with the native /etc/zipl.conf which can be empty.

on ppc64le (PowerNV aka bare-metal) the boot process uses either the BLS
snippets or generated grub.cfg, it's a kexec based boot process with
petitboot as the boot application in a separate Linux environment.
Something like nmbl [1] is trying to achieve.

on ppc64le (pseries - LPARs and KVM guests) the grub binary lives
(dd-ed) in a separate partition (PReP type) and then it accesses any
grub supported filesystem for /boot.

Also be aware that eg. on s390x the cloud qcow2 image is created
without separate /boot partition in Fedora and RHEL.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/979789/


                Dan
-- 
_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
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/[email protected]
Do not reply to spam, report it: 
https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue

Reply via email to