On Tue, Apr 5, 2022 at 11:47 AM Gregory Bartholomew
<gregory.lee.bartholomew@gmail.com> wrote:
> I haven't done a "default" Fedora Server installation in a long time, so I'm not sure how they are laid out. But I seem to remember /boot being a separate partition for a long time (it used to be required because some older BOISs couldn't read beyond a certain sector on the disk). Could not /boot be converted to the ESP (i.e. reformatted with FAT32) on such systems?
No. It would need to be reformatted as FAT to be firmware readable.
And thus this is an irreversible modification. There will be lengthy
periods of time that are simply not crash safe. So the risk is
probably unacceptably high that the user ends up abandoned on a
deserted island, in which case it's better to just steer them toward
the well understood and document process of reprovisioning (clean
install time). Yes it's tedious, but it's well understood and very
reliable, and that counts for more than convenience in QA terms.
I get where you are coming from. But I might have an idea about how at least the "There will be lengthy
periods of time that are simply not crash safe" problem could be addressed.
What if upgrades from BIOS to UEFI mode *had* to be done from an installation DVD/Thumb drive? Then there is a guaranteed way that the system can be booted (otherwise the user would not have been able to initiate the automated upgrade). Additionally, the upgrade process could make a dd backup of the previous /boot partition (and the 440-byte boot sector) before reformatting it. In the worst-case scenario, the backup of the BIOS bootsector and partition could be restored. But another option the user could have if they so chose would be to leave the installation media connected to the computer such that it would provide the legacy boot chain if the UEFI upgrade didn't fully work for whatever reason. I'm guessing that if a user is willing to put up with running such old hardware that it doesn't support UEFI, they might also be OK with going *really* old-school and having to boot the system off an external media (e.g. leave the CD in the drive bay or leave the thumb drive plugged into the back of the machine for the remainder of its life)? Presumably the installation media could be configured to default to chain-loading the /boot/loader/entries file if one exists that is equal to or newer than the kernel of the installation disc?
This is just an idea that I'm throwing out there. I'm not even sure how much I care for it myself.