From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Brown Subject: Re: Soft RAID and EFI systems Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 09:48:54 +0100 Message-ID: <52F0A976.9080306@hesbynett.no> References: <70EFD3D5-F7AC-4359-8888-99EB6CCA9E4F@colorremedies.com> <52EEB9F2.2000607@gmail.com> <3D3B8F1A-F525-459D-95F2-9D7889C222CD@colorremedies.com> <52EECD53.30802@turmel.org> <52F0A79F.7090707@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <52F0A79F.7090707@gmail.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Francis Moreau , Phil Turmel , Chris Murphy Cc: linux-raid List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 04/02/14 09:41, Francis Moreau wrote: > On 02/02/2014 11:57 PM, Phil Turmel wrote: >> On 02/02/2014 05:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote: >>> >>> On Feb 2, 2014, at 2:34 PM, Francis Moreau >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> That's funny because one of the reasons I want to use UEFI firmware >>>> is to get rid of grub (I don't like it and the way it has become >>>> such a bloated beast): since /boot is vfat and has its own >>>> partition, I prefer use a much simpler bootloader such as >>>> gummyboot. >> >> Ditching the bootloader is possible: >> >> http://kroah.com/log/blog/2013/09/02/booting-a-self-signed-linux-kernel/ >> > > Well yeah it's possible but not currently usable IMHO. It means that you > need to build your own kernel, include in this kernel the initramfs > image and you need to redo the whole process if you want to change a > single option in the kernel command line. > >> It seems to me that you should be able to create a raid1 v1.0 MD array >> of your EFI support partitions, and put the combined and signed >> kernel/initramfs onto it (mirrored to all member drives). > > Are both v0.9 and v1.0 MD put their metadata at the end of a partition > ? I thought only v0.9 would do that. Yes, it is only 0.9 format that is at the end of the partition. This means that a plain raid1 mirror (with as many disks as you like, as long as they are simple mirrors and not raid10) looks just like a normal partition for other tools. As long as it is read-only, tools that are not raid-aware can use it. For example, grub and lilo can happily boot from a 0.9 metadata raid1 array just like from a normal partition. (Actually, modern grub understands a lot of md raid formats.) The same thing should apply to EFI, as long as it does not attempt to write to the partition. > >> >> Then set the UEFI bios to try each device's ESP in turn. >> >> Untested ... :-) > > I'll do :) > > Thanks >