| 2 Aug 2025 |
 aloisw | Since when do they recommend /efi? | 11:15:23 |
 ElvishJerricco | systemd-gpt-auto-generator mounts the ESP on /efi unless /boot is an existing empty directory and isn't going to be used for XBOOTLDR | 11:16:52 |
| ElvishJerricco | i.e. it only mounts the ESP at /boot if it really really looks like this person is used to it being there | 11:17:11 |
 emily | yeah and the Lennart blog post advocating for the modern ESP/XBOOTLDR handling explicitly advocates for /efi for it | 11:17:48 |
| emily | that's the standard if you have XBOOTLDR as /boot but the post and man page are pretty clear that the recommendation is not conditional on that | 11:18:26 |
| emily | of course nobody does this in practice if you don't XBOOTLDR and probably some things still even do /boot/efi but it's the word of god on the matter | 11:19:06 |
| emily | XBOOTLDR is frankly probably a good idea anyway. our kernels and initrds are fairly big and we make more of them than most distros thanks to our generation handling | 11:20:13 |
| emily | and our handling when you get out of disk space on the boot partition is bad | 11:20:31 |
| emily | and graphical installer users are much more likely to be dual booting with an existing Windows-created anaemically-sized ESP | 11:21:00 |
| emily | FWIW https://gitlab.gnome.org/p3732/os-installer is a generic installer framework that looked like it might be nicer than Calamares when I took a brief look a while ago but I didn't go very in depth. there's a prototype NixOS thing for it linked but I wouldn't be surprised if it's wonky in the same ways as our Calamares one | 11:43:18 |
| emily | there's also https://github.com/snowfallorg/icicle. vlinkz has written more graphical NixOS installers than anyone else on the planet apparently | 11:43:47 |
| ElvishJerricco | oh also, it should also be noted why you want ESP at /efi and not /boot/efi. You can't have /boot as an automount if the ESP is at /boot/efi. It'll have to be always mounted instead of on demand. | 11:47:40 |
| emily | it could theoretically automount both but yes (although frankly that whole automounting business feels a little overengineered to me anyway) | 11:49:51 |
| emily | but that's only relevant when you have both | 11:49:58 |
| emily | I'm just saying that the rec is technically /efi with only the ESP even though it'd weird and people would say it's weird :) | 11:50:36 |
| emily | *it's | 11:51:03 |
| aloisw | In reply to @elvishjerricco:matrix.org
oh also, it should also be noted why you want ESP at /efi and not /boot/efi. You can't have /boot as an automount if the ESP is at /boot/efi. It'll have to be always mounted instead of on demand. To be clear I was confused about /boot vs /efi for the ESP. | 11:52:14 |
| emily | well when you have ESP + XBOOTLDR it's /efi and /boot | 11:53:27 |
| ElvishJerricco | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
it could theoretically automount both but yes (although frankly that whole automounting business feels a little overengineered to me anyway) Well my point was that nested automounts don't work. The need for the child dir to exist forces the parent to be actually mounted | 11:54:02 |
| emily | it's just that the behaviour and statements from systemd upstream imply that ESP on /boot when you have no XBOOTLDR is legacy compat behaviour | 11:54:04 |
| aloisw | So the new recommendation is basically to have the ESP at the same place regardless of whether you have XBOOTLDR, understood. | 11:54:15 |
| emily | it's actually as old as the initial recs around XBOOTLDR on UEFI | 11:54:33 |
| emily | people just didn't read the blog post | 11:54:39 |
| emily | In reply to @elvishjerricco:matrix.org
Well my point was that nested automounts don't work. The need for the child dir to exist forces the parent to be actually mounted it could automount both partitions when you want /boot/efi is my point. (I know Lennart doesn't like this because what if you only need one of them but like, c'mon. like hooray I can mount one FAT32 instead of two if and only if I'm updating systemd-boot but not kernel/initrd or vice versa. big win) | 11:56:06 |
| emily | I do agree /efi is sensible I just think it is a bit mountain out of a molehill. | 11:56:25 |
| ElvishJerricco |
it could automount both partitions when you want /boot/efi is my point.
I don't understand what you mean by this. If you make two .automount units where one is a child of the other, the parent will just literally always be mounted and it won't behave like an automount. So no, you can't automount both
| 11:57:42 |
| aloisw | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
it's actually as old as the initial recs around XBOOTLDR on UEFI That still means that the recommendation has changed since XBOOTLDR was a later addition. | 11:58:11 |
| emily | In reply to @aloisw:julia0815.de
That still means that the recommendation has changed since XBOOTLDR was a later addition. I'm not sure people were regularly mounting ESP on /boot before at least gummiboot? /boot/efi was pretty ubiquitous for GRUB and so on | 11:59:29 |
| emily | but I can believe there were some months between the two :) | 12:00:01 |
| emily | oh what | 12:00:24 |
