[Novalug] Mint, CentOS, and Fedora

Bryan Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org
Mon Mar 28 20:42:26 EDT 2016


Stuart Gathman wrote:
> I'm hinting with a little sarcasm that your description was woefully
> incomplete.  I'm sure there is some way to replace a disk or
> motherboard or boot install media

It's not hard at all.

> - but what you've mentioned sure sounds like a *lot* of trouble.

Depends on your viewpoint.

If you mean any disk you stick in "just tries to boot," that can
actually be a PITA with legacy PC BIOS.

E.g., your disks get re-enumerated or, worse yet, puts one drive in
front of another -- _including_ USB.  In Linux, we've moved to either
the UUID of file systems and/or DM paths (e.g., LVM, multipath,
etc...) to address this issue.

With uEFI, it's now _always_ UUID for the firmware as well.  No more
"ooops, stuck in another drive or USB, booting wrong disk."

> E.g., you yourself said you have to have a running system with
> some uEFI BIOSes in order to edit the UUID.  Catch 22.

Never said such.  I said some uEFI firmware (I wouldn't recommend it
you call it a "BIOS," because if creates confusion) implementations
have better, more interactive setup than others.

> On such systems, how do you ever do your first install?

Huh?  Again, you're just spewing a lot of FUD, even if that's
unintentional.  Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD).

> I used RISC platforms (IBM AIX and Motorola SysV for 68k and 88k) for 20
> years, including the forth based open firmware.  I patched binary utils
> to fix bugs because the source license was $100000.   I wrote an early
> 88k GCC port and used it in production.  RISC platforms are  *nothing*
> like the nightmare I've been seeing from your keyboard concerning uEFI.

What?  From my keyboard?  Or the constant FUD thrown around?  I'm just
trying to break through them.

Again, if you like many RISC/UNIX platform firmware, you'll like uEFI.
You basically "target" storage to boot in similar fashions as many
RISC/UNIX platforms.

> Mind you, I suspect there are key aspects that aren't getting across -
> but the little tidbits you are dribbling out are classic catch 22s.

No, you are _adding_ non-sense (various FUD you've seemingly read) or
unrelated items (e.g., SecureBoot), and then _reading_ too much into
them.  Seriously.  Stop creating FUD.

> On RISC platforms, I just told the BIOS what device to boot from if I
> needed a new disk or motherboard.  No saving and restoring garbage.

Sigh ... we're going nowhere.

> Maybe what you meant to say is that you need to program a UUID for an
> *unattended* boot.  Now *that* would be a reasonable feature to have.
> In fact, that is pretty much what you did for unattended boot on AIX
> systems.  But unconditionally requiring a UUID to boot?  Catch 22 city!
> So can you enlighten me on how the h8-1234 catch 22 (apparently secure
> boot problem rather than uEFI) can be solved?

_No_.  I'm done feeding your blatant _negativity_.  This is why I do
_not_ like to help people.  You take what I say, and then twist it.
Seriously, stop.

Anyone want to move on to systemd after this?  Seriously.


--
Bryan J Smith  -  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
E-mail:  b.j.smith at ieee.org  or  me at bjsmith.me



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