News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new 0-day Secure Boot bug. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new ... by vladvasiliu on Saturday May 13, 2023 @05:15PM (#35932812)
What I've done on a pc that needs to dual boot and has a single drive is create a bigger /efi partition and store a unified kernel image that I boot directly with the uefi. No grub or shim or systemd-boot or whatever extra moving part. I can use the integrated uefi boot selector to switch to the non-default os.

I've had this setup for a while now, and the multiple windows updates never bothered to make windows the default boot entry.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new ... by csdvrx on Saturday May 13, 2023 @05:50PM (#35933122)
I do the same! My EFI partitions are always a few gigs, because I even stuff .isos into it for easy reinstall/rescue operations:)

For people who are stuck with a 260 (or 100M) EFI, repurposing the 0x27 partition is easier: just shrink the end of your windows partition, and add what you gained to the 0x27 partition after backing up its content - no need to touch the other partitions!

Shrinking a partition from the beginning (as what would be needed to get a larger EFI) can be harder

> No grub or shim or systemd-boot or whatever extra moving part.

Same, the arch way is just better! FYI you may want to add a grubfmx64.efi in there, to be able to select entries more easily for rescue ops. You also get a grub commandline.

I don't like grub as a normal bootloader, but I like having its flexibility when I want to.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new ... by vladvasiliu on Sunday May 14, 2023 @02:56AM (#35935938)
Ha, sticking a rescue ISO on a partition is actually a nice touch, never thought of that.

> you may want to add a grubfmx64.efi in there, to be able to select entries more easily for rescue ops

I hate having to deal with bootloaders with a passion. But it could come in handy if my efi can't boot directly from the iso. It does have the option to browse local drives and boot random files, but I've never tried an iso.

Although my rescue iso is custom-made with archlive so that it supports zfs. I could probably just write it to some extra partition and boot it directly.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new ... by csdvrx on Sunday May 14, 2023 @01:47PM (#35939793)
> my rescue iso is custom-made with archlive so that it supports zfs. I could probably just write it to some extra partition and boot it directly.

Interesting! Would you like to share it somewhere (or at least the build instrunctions?

It would be faster than a ubuntu live, which needs to start Gnome, while I often only need gdisk, dd, efibootmgr and zfs!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft will take nearly a year to finish patching new ... by vladvasiliu on Sunday May 14, 2023 @02:21PM (#35940079)
It's pretty basic, really. Follow the Arch Wiki guide to build an ISO and add the packages from the archzfs repo. One unrelated tip is to also bake your ssh pubkey in the ISO, it comes in handy.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS#Create_an_Archiso_image...

[ Parent | on HN ]