On 2018-09-12 10:11 +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 11:32:56PM -0400, Lee wrote:
>>Just out of curiosity - why would journaling be undesirable on a
>>partition that is almost never written to?
>
> …I'm not sure what the answer to your question is, but with regards
> /boot and filesystems: on one EFI host of mine, I had a lot of problems
> with /boot/efi precisely because it couldn't be journalled (mandated to
> be vfat) and I had filesystem issues with it after every unscheduled
> power failure. I ended up bodging my system to mount it read-only by
> default, and had to add some apt hooks to remount it writeable for a
> selection of packages (e.g. new kernel, basically anything that might
> trigger an initramfs rebuild)
This sounds like you put /boot/efi on the same filesystem as /boot which
is not recommended or supported at all[1]. On my laptop there is only a
single file under /boot/efi, namely /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi -
which will be written to on updates to the grub-efi package, but not
when installing a new kernel or rebuilding an initramfs.
This is ABSOLUTELY not supported, because VFAT doesn't give the Permissions and File Ownership needed for the Linux Kernel, and supporting files. Also, you might be using an existing EFI Partition, courtesy of Microsoft. (For example, I have a Lenovo, that came with Windows 10 Installed, which I Completely Replaced with Xubuntu 16.04 [planned to be replaced with Debian Stretch in the next Month]. The only Windows now is under Virtualbox, and hasn't been booted in Months! BUT: EFI is the original vfat Partition that came with the Laptop). /boot is ext2, because I was never "told" to make it anything else!
Cheers,
Sven
1. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=163988
Best regards,
Kenneth Parker