On 12/01/2025 at 19:43, Holger Wansing wrote:
Am 12. Januar 2025 19:17:19 MEZ schrieb Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org>:On 12/01/2025 at 16:29, Holger Wansing wrote:Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org> wrote (Sun, 12 Jan 2025 16:13:21 +0100):I just wanted to make sure everyone is aware that the revert fixes only this specific use case (guided partitioning using LVM with or without encryption). The issue already existed and remains when using guided partitioniong without LVM (ext4 root, no separate /boot).Ok, so that's fine. With this fix in place, there is at least the LVM partitioning scheme (with or without encryption), which works out of the box with default choice. And assuming we got no complains before about this situation on this machine, I guess it's fine this way.There is too much inconsistency here for me to say it is fine."Is fine" was rather meant as "ok, I understand what you meant".
Ah, I read it as "the risk of boot failure when using guided partitioning without LVM is acceptable while nobody complains".
On one hand, the recipes for ppc64el create an optional ext2 /boot partition only with LVM, which means that booting with Petitboot will fail if the user chooses guided partitioning without LVM. On the other hand, the recipes for arm64 uselessly create a mandatory ext4 /boot partition even without LVM. In between, the recipes for amd64 create an optional ext4 /boot partition only with LVM and the default recipes create a mandatory ext2 /boot partition in all cases. Either a common boot loader for a given architecture does not support /boot on ext4 and then the recipes for this architecture should create a mandatory ext2 /boot partition in all cases (like default recipes), or all common boot loaders are known to support /boot on ext4 and then the recipes should create an optional ext4 /boot partition only with LVM (like recipes for amd64).What you describe would be the perfect world. But what we have here leads to a trade-off anyway. We cannot do it perfectly right for all cases.
In a perfect world, all boot loaders would support /boot on ext4 and we would not have to make trade-offs. Indeed we must make a trade-off between robustness (ext4 vs ext2), convenience (/boot in root filesystem vs small separate /boot) and compatibility with boot loaders. And I believe we can do it right at least for use cases we know about. You addressed the case of guided partitioning without LVM on ppc64el, why not do the same for guided partitioning without LVM ? Do you think that the robustness or convenience gain of not having a separate ext2 /boot partition is worth the loss of compatibility with Petitboot ?