Mkinitcpio v31 and UEFI Stubs

A similar option is to boot a kernel using the built-in EFI stub (CONFIG_EFI_STUB=y), embed the initramfs if you use one (CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE), and set the default command line with CONFIG_CMDLINE if configuring it via UEFI is too unpleasant. I boot like this.

Advantage: less complex than adding another layer (and dependency) with the gummiboot stub.

Disadvantage: relinking the kernel is more expensive than rebundling with objcopy, if you change initramfs with the same kernel often.

Disadvantage: it's not an option if you use a distribution kernel binary instead of building your own.

Not related to this change in particular, but: mkinitcpio is neat to me because it is one of the last pieces of bespoke distro-specific software that's stayed on my radar.

It used to be that distros had to come up with huge piles of distro-specific scripting to build a complete system, but the trend has been to create independent projects so that each distro doesn't need to reinvent things. Distros used to have a lot of custom bootup scripts, which have been largely replaced by modular components of systemd. For many distros, the scripts for creating the init ramdisk have been replaced by Dracut; but not on Arch Linux and derivatives, Dave Reisner's mkinitcpio is still going strong. And it's interesting that Arch is being a holdout with Dracut, when they were one of the first adopters of systemd.

I do create my own "EFI stub" by embedding the kernel and initrd in a GRUB image as memdisk using grub-mkimage. Then I sign that using my own keys and copy it over to the EFI partition. One cool thing about it is that I can still adjust kernel boot parameters, or load entirely different kernels by mounting the encrypted LVM volume of I really need to. Using the kernel's own stub support this isn't possible, but at the end the grub image still a single self-contained bootable EFI executable file, just like the Linux stub.

If the author reads this:

Thanks a lot.

I have been using some package manager hooks to do roughly the same thing mkinitcpio no natively supports ;=)