Arch Linux

bachchain

Member

Registered: 2016-11-03

Posts: 7

[Solved] Booting with Discoverable Partitions

I recently found out about the "Discoverable Partitions Spec". It sounded interesting, so I decided to experiment to see if I could boot with it using rEFInd. Everything I've read says this should be possible, however I haven't been able to get it to work so far, and it's unclear to me why. I have a test VM in virtualbox with Arch installed using the standard installation procedure. It has an esp, swap, and root partition, created with fdisk and configured with EFI System, Linux swap, and Linux root (x86_64) partition types respectively, with the esp mounted at /efi. rEFInd was installed using refind-install, and refind.conf was modified to enable write_systemd_vars true. Trying to boot after removing the root= kernel parameter results in

:: running hook [keymap]
:: Loading keymap...done.
ERROR: device '' not found. Skipping fsck.
:: mounting '' on real root
mount: /new_root: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on , missing codepage or helper program, or other error.
ERROR: Failed to mount '' on real root
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
[rootfs ~]#

Last edited by bachchain (2024-01-28 19:20:04)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [Solved] Booting with Discoverable Partitions

That is a busybox based initramfs, not a systemd based one. Systemd can't detect anything if it's not running.

What's the point of removing root= anyway?

Last edited by Scimmia (2024-01-28 18:58:22)

bachchain

Member

Registered: 2016-11-03

Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] Booting with Discoverable Partitions

That is a busybox based initramfs, not a systemd based one. Systemd can't detect anything if it's not running.

What's the point of removing root= anyway?

My apologies. I didn't include the full boot output since there wasn't an easy way for me to turn it all into text

removing root= was my way of checking if it was actually working, since refind was defaulting to using a partuuid, which works but isn't what i was testing

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [Solved] Booting with Discoverable Partitions

right....?

Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinit … time_hooks and the section after it.

bachchain

Member

Registered: 2016-11-03

Posts: 7

Re: [Solved] Booting with Discoverable Partitions

right....?

Read https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinit … time_hooks and the section after it.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were saying. So I have to also add systemd as a initramfs hook. That was never mentioned in any of the documentation I found. It works now