On Wed, Jul 27, 2022, at 9:46 PM, Stephen Smoogen wrote:


On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 17:37 Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com> wrote:


On Wed, Jul 27, 2022, at 5:07 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mi, 27.07.22 17:01, Chris Murphy (lists@colorremedies.com) wrote:
> 65;6800;1c

>> If the additional barrier to adoption that Fedora imposes is that
>> every distro needs to also include signed efifs ext4 in order to
>> read $BOOT, I think it's too much.
>
> I do not follow that logic. First of all, if they can sign grub or
> sd-boot they should be able to sign efifs too. Secondly, they could
> just embedd the relevant efifs driver in the sd-boot binary, and sign
> the result (see other mail). Hence, you build two binaries. Make one
> of them. Sign one binary.

Sure. But all the distros need to support and build efifs drivers in order to support at least common $BOOT file systems across all of Linux, if they're really truly committed to BLS, if not arbitrary file systems.

There's at least ext4, XFS, Btrfs widely used as $BOOT by default these days. But more when looking at what distro installers allow /boot to be: f2fs, ZFS, LUKS, LVM... 

Seems like a Pandora's box to me.

But isn’t what you are outlining an existing Pandora’s box you are going to have to deal with? All those systems are existing already and will be in place. Telling all couple hundred thousand dual boosters you have to reformat a partition to play with the new thing is also a high bar to deal with. 

I'm lost. I'm trying to figure out how Fedora users with Windows Bitlocker enabled, can still boot Windows in a sane way. None of the four ideas I put forward require reformatting anything.

a. Fix/enhance GRUB so it uses "bootnext" and a reboot to directly use the Windows bootloader
b. Create a user space utility that can use "bootnext" (optionally also "bootorder" for persistent change) to directly use the Windows bootloader
c. Change the release criterion (I don't know that this really gets us off the hook, it's just a plain bad experience even without a criterion)
d. Shout from a mountain for more help (punt)

The systemd-boot idea is not one I oppose, but it's not going to happen until Fedora 38 at the soonest, even if someone proposed it, even if it got accepted. It looks to me like a moonshot, thus not that interesting when we have a problem to solve now.


There is also going to be issues where various windows software is going to see this mountable partition and play with it. Going from past experience every anti virus will freak out at least once a month over seeing Linux executables on a fat partition and quarantine them. 

As far as I'm aware, Windows ignores GPT partition type GUIDs it doesn't recognize. You have actually experienced what you're describing?


Yes your system is easier to deal with but it is still not as simple as it seems to be seen. It is going to be painful in new ways

Still not sure what the context is.


--
Chris Murphy