On 2025-02-17 11:28, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Mon, Feb 17, 2025 at 5:45 AM Michael Chang <mchang@suse.com> wrote:
There are people in Fedora who want to put everything in the ESP, but there are many (including myself) who think it's a terrible idea. The ESP can only get so big before various systems fail to be able to read it, and not all firmwares even handle a FAT32 ESP either.
What is everything? We are putting the boot entry, the kernel and the initrd in the ESP. In the future, if we go to the UKI path, we will put them instead. Because how openSUSE snapshots are designed, the kernel and the initrd can be shared between multiple snapshots, and only the boot entry will be different here. This is compatible with multi-kernels and save a lot of space. UEFI can only read FAT32, and moving the kernel and initrd into /boot will force the user to use only grub2-bls (and that is fine), but with the current design they can use systemd-boot and grub2-bls as a drop-in replacement. Maybe this restriction is too much to pay for just selecting between different boot loaders, but it simplify a lot later, when more interesting features for the user like FDE or automatic boot assessment are enabled. I know that some developers experimented with UEFI file systems drivers, but AFAIK those approach are yet very brittle and limited. I guess this can be revisited later, or we can invest time on improving the situation.