On Do, 11.05.23 03:59, Neal Gompa (ngompa13@gmail.com) wrote:
On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 3:33 AM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek@in.waw.pl wrote:
On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 05:54:45PM -0400, Chris Murphy wrote:
I don't know what question you asked them. Any modifications (writes) performed outside kernel code is not supported, since forever.
Read-only drivers, which are the only drivers under discussion here, aren't a per se problem because they can't modify the file system. So they have no complaints about that.
Just read-only is not enough: a user must be able to configure things in the boot loader: the default boot entry, or screen resolution, etc. Also we want boot counting, which means writing the number of boot attempts somewhere. A solution which makes those things impossible is not very attractive.
We already don't do boot counting from the bootloader side. That happens in the operating system.
If that was the case you could only count good boots, i.e. the ones where you actually boot far enough into the OS. But that's useless information. What you really care about for the purpose of automatic fallback on failure is to count *bad* boots, and that means you have to start counting *before* you hand off control to the OS, i.e. as early as you can and then see if for that count you actually manage to reach the OS.
Hence, if you care about realibility, automatic fallback and such things, you need a writable boot partition. And that doesn't leave many options, but VFAT.
Lennart
-- Lennart Poettering, Berlin