Fedora annoyed me and I said screw it, I’m going back to arch. But I cant remember how I got it to work the last time I set it up. There’s a couple weird issues and changes since last I set this up that I think are contributing to this.

1 - /boot/efi is no longer considered an appropriate mount point. just create a EFI partition and mount it /efi and let the OS put /boot inside the root partition if it needs it., then throw a UKI on /boot/efi/EFI/Linux. Problem? bootctl insists I am either in a container or not in EFI mode. I have not been successful in convincing it otherwise.

2 - bcachefs boot time mounting is in a weird place right now. supposedly I can call a piece of the array by UUID and it will just mount, but I used to use the old_blk_id method in fstab and the modern equivalent to that appears to be grabbing the UUID off bcachefs fs usage, which will show the UUID that matches all members of the array under blkid, which is noted as being broken at the moment. Why not use btrfs? well I tried it and found it annoyingly inflexible and finally gave up and am trying to go back to what worked on my last home server.

3 - I’m attempting to use UKI this time to make it easier to transition into using secure boot when I feel like doing that later on, and its possible that UKI, systemd-boot, bcachefs, and the /efi mountpoint are not a great mix.

help? :(

  • Ilumar@lemmy.zip
    3·
    3 days ago

    I’ve never used bcachefs so no help from me there.

    /boot/efi is no longer considered an appropriate mount point

    It’s not typical, but it should still work. systemd-boot even looks for the ESP there by default among /boot and /efi
    Personally I use /efi.

    just create a EFI partition and mount it /efi and let the OS put /boot inside the root partition if it needs it., then throw a UKI on /boot/efi/EFI/Linux

    If I’m reading this correctly you mounted the ESP to /efi and then put the UKI in /boot/efi anyway. It needs to be on the ESP.
    My /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset looks like this, if it helps. If you were to use /boot/efi for the ESP you would have to change the paths here.

    /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset 
    # mkinitcpio preset file for the 'linux' package

#ALL_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
ALL_kver="/boot/vmlinuz-linux"

PRESETS=('default' 'fallback')

#default_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
#default_image="/boot/initramfs-linux.img"
default_uki="/efi/EFI/Linux/arch-linux.efi"
#default_options="--splash /usr/share/systemd/bootctl/splash-arch.bmp"

#fallback_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
#fallback_image="/boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img"
fallback_uki="/efi/EFI/Linux/arch-linux-fallback.efi"
fallback_options="-S autodetect"

    its possible that UKI, systemd-boot, bcachefs, and the /efi mountpoint are not a great mix

    I don’t see the point of systemd-boot with UKIs. All it does is chain-load the EFI boot stub in the UKI anyway. I just used efibootmgr to create an entry in the UEFI which boots the UKI directly.