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It’s a pity we aren’t really there yet with boot loading. In 2024 if I install an OS it places a boot loader in my EFI System Partition but in a way that still
by gorgoiler 2y ago
It’s a pity we aren’t really there yet with boot loading. In 2024 if I install an OS it places a boot loader in my EFI System Partition but in a way that still feels only partially complete.
What I want is for each OS to install its loader in a unique directory to that OS instance, not unique to the OS vendor. Multiple Debians etc will argue over who controls /debian. You also have to bless UEFI with magic NVRAM variables when it could just scan my EFI System Partitions for any file named “loader” and present that as a boot option.
Perhaps I should just chain from UEFI to something smarter that skips the UEFI-standard and does this smarter thing instead? Debianised GRUB tries to be smart at update-grub time in order to detect OSs but it would be neater if the loader did it.
Edit: In fact I see this is exactly the goal of rEFInd https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ …in particular it laments how “EFI implementations should provide boot managers [but] are often so poor as to be useless” so it tries to do a better job for you. I’ll give it a go.
- juped 2y agorefind will scan all your partitions for EFI bootable things; if you have two ext4 partitions each with a Debian on them, and each has a Linux kernel in /boot, it'll locate them both and you can boot either. Which sounds like what you want.
- pabs3 2y agoTheres the removable media path: https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Booting_from_removable_media https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Booting_from_removable_media https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub-efi_installation_to_the_removable_media_path https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub-efi_installation_to_...
- iam-TJ 2y agoA small side-note to solve your "unique [EFI-SP] directory to that OS instance": In each GRUBified OS instance, in /etc/default/grub (or on Debian and derivatives, to avoid altering the distro-shipped config file, /etc/default/grub.d/local.cfg ), set: GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR= This is used by grub-install. If calling grub-install directly one can also pass --bootloader=id= The value is set via efibootmgr's --label
- winkelmann 2y agoFYI: In my experience, modern UEFI Firmware/BIOSes will scan every FAT32 partition found on attached storage devices for bootable EFI binaries, they don't even appear to care about the GUID/type marking, just that it is FAT32. I never let OSes share an ESP, each install gets its own.