On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 12:01:26PM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > On Thu, Oct 09, 2025 at 01:24:24AM -0400, Chris Murphy wrote: > > > > XBOOTLDR is being formatted either ext4 or XFS for a while now in Fedora. > > > > UEFI spec supports file system drivers. > > Yea, and tianocore even has a ext4 driver (see edk2-ext4.rpm and > https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/master/Features/Ext4Pkg). > > But that helps how exactly? > > vfat is the only filesystem required by the spec, so that is the one you > can rely on being universally supported. The ESP must be vfat anyway. > > You could place the ext4 driver on the ESP. Problem one is this is > fragile. You must arrange for the driver getting loaded. Either via > UEFI boot configuration (aka efi variables) which may get lost, or using > bootloader specific ways to do so. Problem two is the drivers are not > signed, so with secure boot turned on this will not work. > > I could bake the driver into tho OVMF firmware images. That would get > us around the secure boot signature requirement. This obviously would > work for virtual machines only, not your laptop. It would make virtual > machines have slightly different behavior than bare metal machines, > which can be a source of obscure bugs. Also virtual machines do not > really need XBOOTLDR, you rarely have to deal with an existing ESP which > is too small, so you can just make the ESP big enough on your images and > be done with it.
Even if baked into OVMF upstream, we can't assume all public clouds will honour that config choice in the UEFI firmware they offer. So it is only a partial solution for VMs. With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| -- _______________________________________________ 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
