Arch Linux

Simaryp

Member

Registered: 2018-04-28

Posts: 141

Re: Clean up UEFI

BTW: A small side question via your link I stumbled over the fact that I am currently not using trim. Can I add this functionality on already long time used machines or is it something that one should use from the beginning? In first case I assume that just putting :allow-discards at the end of the booting parameter would activate it.

Simaryp

Member

Registered: 2018-04-28

Posts: 141

Re: Clean up UEFI

Oh man it worked. I think the problem  was really stupid. I booted lts kernel but referred in the boot option to initrfs without lts. It just booted up, but got troubles because /home couldnt be mounted. But I think I read that I have to set up /etc/crypttab.

So I think hopefully I can carry on from this point.

I have only three remaining questions at the moment:
1. Arch puts all kernels and stuff now directly to /boot. Can I set it up somewhere that everything goes to /boot/arch in order to get it clean on multi boot systems?
2. In case I want to switch with my other system to this way of booting I assume there is nothing more to do than removing grub, change the mount points, genfstab and install refind, isn't it? I want to keep my systems nearly identical configured to make life easy and I neither want to reinstall the system nor have it messy
3.Maybe you can help me out with the TRIM question or should I create a new thread for this?

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,436

Re: Clean up UEFI

1. Arch puts all kernels and stuff now directly to /boot. Can I set it up somewhere that everything goes to /boot/arch in order to get it clean on multi boot systems?

I would suggest moving the ESP /boot/efi so that the files left in /boot would be the arch kernels and initrds and the systemwide bootloader would be in /boot/efi on the ESP

2. In case I want to switch with my other system to this way of booting I assume there is nothing more to do than removing grub, change the mount points, genfstab and install refind, isn't it? I want to keep my systems nearly identical configured to make life easy and I neither want to reinstall the system nor have it messy

Yes

3.Maybe you can help me out with the TRIM question or should I create a new thread for this?

Beyond pointing you to TRIM I can not help with TRIM as I do not use it.

Simaryp

Member

Registered: 2018-04-28

Posts: 141

Re: Clean up UEFI

I would suggest moving the ESP /boot/efi so that the files left in /boot would be the arch kernels and initrds and the systemwide bootloader would be in /boot/efi on the ESP

This will not be possible. If I mount ESP to /boot/efi /boot would be on the root partition, which is encrypted. Refind can't decrypt the luks container by itself. Therefor /boot has to be on ESP. If there is no easy solution then it's ok. I just thought it might be a minor change in some config to add one folder to /boot.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,436

Re: Clean up UEFI

I meant /boot becomes a separate partition containing an unencrypted filesystem which refind could open.
Edit:
You could bind mount ESP/arch to /boot which would hide the top directory of the ESP originally mounted at /boot,  or mount the ESP at /efi then bind mount /efi/arch to /boot

Last edited by loqs (2019-06-29 22:44:43)

Simaryp

Member

Registered: 2018-04-28

Posts: 141

Re: Clean up UEFI

Ah thanks. With separate boot it would be like previous. Thanks for the hint that mounting folders is possible. I managed now to mount ESP/arch to /boot via `# mount --bind /mnt/efi/arch /mnt/boot. One has only to delete the /mnt in the auto generated fstab in the end.

Thanks a lot! That was really enlightening although it took really long time. But I noted everything down in my install skript and this should make it really fast next time.

There are some more questions I stumbled over but it's really not related to booting and EFI anymore. As a beginner in arch it is sometimes really unclear which of the hundred configuration options are really highly recommended and which are not, like TRIM, tempfs and so on. Looking at other peoples install routines one may end up with stuff that is not really usefull or maybe even outdated. Maybe with maintaining arch one can assume that in doubt if everything runs already no adaptions are needed.