On Sat, 2012-10-06 at 00:06 +0200, Maik Zumstrull wrote: > Package: src:linux > Version: 3.5.5-1~experimental.1 > Severity: normal > > Call me a masochist, but I've been using UEFI boot on systems new enough > to support it. For this, it makes sense to have the kernel and initrd > images on the EFI system partition. > > It's not an absolute requirement. One could have grub on the system > partition, and have grub read the kernel off whatever filesystem it's on. > > However, as far as I can tell, the direction the boot process is going > is for the kernel to be an EFI executable. No boot loader in the > oldschool sense, just something to select which kernel to run and pass a > command line. No boot loader... just a boot loader? I suppose you're trying to say that the EFI operating system removes much of the need for the GRUB operating system. :-) > To simply run the kernel as an EFI application, two requirements: > - The kernel image has to be compiled as an EFI executable. Recent > Debian kernel images are. > - The kernel image has to be on a file system EFI can read. That doesn't > necessarily mean the system partition, but it does mean vfat. > > Now, in linux-image-* packages, the kernel image is simply a file in > /boot. If /boot is the EFI system partition, dpkg will fail to update > the package, because dpkg assumes file systems have hard link support. > > When this issue came up back in 2008, it was decided to just accept this > dpkg limitation and officially require /boot to be a POSIX file system. > I suggest to revisit this decision in the context of UEFI boot. > > How best to implement this depends on the preferred way of mounting the > system partition. Arguably, the system partition should be /boot, since > that's the point. In that case, one could ship the kernel image beneath > /lib in the package and copy it to /boot from postinst. There are at least 4 independent implementations of .deb kernel packages (Debian linux source package, Ubuntu linux source package, kernel-package and upstream 'make deb-dpkg'). All of these install directly in /boot and all would need to be changed to support this. > Another popular option is to have /boot on the root file system and the > system partition on /boot/efi. The use of /boot/efi is fairly well-established, and not just in Debian. > In that case, it would be fine to leave > the kernel image in the package as it is now, but the package should > offer to always keep copies of the kernel and the initrd in /boot/efi. Believe it or not, you can actually make the Debian packages install the kernel image there already: # /etc/kernel-img.conf image_dest = /boot/efi do_symlinks = no no_symlinks = yes However it will always be installed as vmlinuz (with older versions named vmlinuz.~1~ etc). And the initramfs is another matter. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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