Dear Debian kernel maintainers,
people wanting to give systemd-boot a try cannot currently follow the upstream
recommended setup [1] that mounts a FAT-formatted partition (either the XBOOTLDR
partition from the spec or ESP [2]) to /boot/, since dpkg requires a lot of
things from the underlying filesystem that FAT does not support [3].
This could be worked around by shipping the files that are currently installed
to /boot/ to /usr/lib/ instead, e.g. /usr/lib/modules/$KERNEL_VERSION/ as Arch
and Fedora do, and if necessary copy the files into /boot/ in a postinst script
and remove them likewise, as Fedora does.
I know this is probably too late in the cycle for bookworm, but I wanted to get
a discussion on this started in time for trixie.
best regards,
Jörg Behrmann
[1] https://systemd.io/BOOT_LOADER_SPECIFICATION/
Talking with upstream the preference would be having two partitions,
XBOOTLDR mounted to /boot/ and the ESP mounted to /efi/, which would allow
for either to be automounted, since neither systemd's automount logic nor
autofs' one allows for nested automounts.
[2] It is clear that the ESP needs to be FAT-partitioned. Why then use it for
yet another partition? Reading FAT comes free with the EFI firmware, so
putting boot-related things on FAT partitions frees one from implementing
reading "real" filesystems, no matter what partition setup one uses.
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/FAQ#Q:_What_are_the_filesystem_requirements_by_dpkg.3F
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