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 -- Regards, Peter.
