Re:Grub2 security update renders system unbootable
by Spivak on Thursday July 30, 2020 @01:24PM
(#24000738)
> You can't boot to an mdraid device with systemd-boot, you can only have a separate (non mirrored or raid'd) partition on a drive, and point to that drive to boot.
Sorta kinda true in theory but not in practice. Yes systemd-boot isn't raid aware but if you configure mdraid to store its metadata at the end of the drive then you wind up with a, say, mirrored disk that to the firmware doesn't look like it's mirrored at all. And since the firmware just reads the partition it's safe and works.
So yes, you have to configure your firmware to look at both drives in a mirrored setup as a fallback but you can boot.
> but saying "nobody cares" is just needlessly dismissive
Fair, I'm more saying that having firmware that only supports a small set of simple filesystems is the usually the more normal situation, the fact that GRUB comes with all the drivers makes it the weird one.
Sorta kinda true in theory but not in practice. Yes systemd-boot isn't raid aware but if you configure mdraid to store its metadata at the end of the drive then you wind up with a, say, mirrored disk that to the firmware doesn't look like it's mirrored at all. And since the firmware just reads the partition it's safe and works.
So yes, you have to configure your firmware to look at both drives in a mirrored setup as a fallback but you can boot.
> but saying "nobody cares" is just needlessly dismissive
Fair, I'm more saying that having firmware that only supports a small set of simple filesystems is the usually the more normal situation, the fact that GRUB comes with all the drivers makes it the weird one.