What Is Rpikernelhack? (2019)

This was a great read. It's interesting how closely this mirrors a huge problem on PC's as well! PC's these days boot from an EFI partition that is FAT32. These hacks help the RPi boot Debian from a FAT32 parition, but there's still a lot of missing hackery to help Debian boot an x86 UEFI computer from a FAT32 partition.

It'd be great if Debian would support FAT32 /boot partitions.

This would make it much easier to use an UEFI partition as /boot. Projects like systemd-boot (nee Gummiboot) make this very easy & natural to do, but the way Debian backs up kernels via symlinks (not soft symlinks) before installing new kernels & has no fallback behavior for this makes Debian quite difficult to manage in a UEFI environment.

To my knowledge there is still not a good automated way to copy kernels onto the EFI partition in Debian. Definitely not in systemd-boot world. Not sure what Grub does (honestly if you are on grub switch of, it is a true technological terror, unbelievably complex & multi-piece. EFI is remarkably sensible & helpful on it's own & just adding something like systemd-boot for picking is immensely powerful while not requiring multiple dozens of kilobyte grub.cfg's that some automated program has to keep probing & rebuilding).

Bad naming choice since it will fly past people's eyes during an apt-get update/upgrade. Should have called it RpiFAT32Update or something.

Whew this is a relief. I thought maybe Rob Pike hacked my Pi!