Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK Debian still doesnt have any integration available for handling thee integration of systemd-boot & kernel packages: there's nothing to maintain the loader/entries files that systemd-boot expects! It's really a shame because systemd-boot is 10x simpler and 100x more plesant to work with than grub & it's multiple overlapping but different obtuse config handling shell scripts. Bootctl is excellent & understandable, the entries are human readable/authorable.

I've been on systemd-boot for a long while now. For a while I was just hand maintaining vmlinuzs & loader entries, copying & editing stuff on /boot/efi. Easy but inelegant & I'd forget the very simple steps.

I've been copy pasting (well, its in my ansible now) /etc/kernel/postinst.d/ hooks from stackoverflow, which writes these files, & that greatly simplified life. It's a jank hurdle & I wish my os would actually support this wonderful easy to use tool. Systemd-boot is so much less obtuse, such a breath or fresh air, after years of grub (and many of uboot as well, but that's a different sector).

I made the jump ~two years ago to a single partition, just the ESP partition. Theres a warning abiut not being able to set permissions properly but its worked fine & been so much more pleasant to operate. Very strongly recommend. It just worked for me on Debian, no real fiddling.

https://github.com/filakhtov/kernel-postinst-d/blob/master/9...

OTOH it's nice to have access to the boot loader via serial console. The system developers judgement is that it's up to the firmware to provide serial console access if needed. Well I'll just get my chequebook out then...

Also it would be nice to be able to interact with the boot loader on a modern laptop display without having to get out a magnifying glass. Another problem that is deigned to be the fault of the firmware.

One of the great things about open source operating systems is that people step up to provide these sorts of improvements and I think it's a shame that systemd-boot will cause regression here.

>Also it would be nice to be able to interact with the boot loader on a modern laptop display without having to get out a magnifying glass. Another problem that is deigned to be the fault of the firmware.

> I think it's a shame that systemd-boot will cause regression here.

If you use grub2, yes you need the magnifying glass.

Meanwhile, I just press F12 and use the BIOS (which selects a readable font) and pick the UEFI entry I want.

Can't edit kernel parameters from the firmware's own boot selector though can you. Or see it on an external monitor (at least on the laptop I'm using right now, which normally lives hidden out of sight attached to a dock).

My recollection was that GRUB when in graphical mode looks readable. Maybe I'm misremembering. The systemd-boot menu was definitely far too small and there was bug that was basically closed with "it's the firmware's job to give us a usable text output protocol".

Effectively, as shitty as the legacy PC-BIOS boot protocol was, it did at least allow open source software to jump in early and work around the gaping deficiencies in the vendor's firmware. UEFI has effectively replaced all that with a proprietary boot process. The vendor is now in complete control; want a usable text console, or to access the firmware via an external monitor? Vendor doesn't give a shit. Want to access the boot loader via the serial console? Oh you must be an enterprise, let me direct you to our sales staff who won't give you the time of day unless you've got £thousands to drop into their pocket.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to replace GRUB with systemd-boot, but these are very real impediments to me ever doing so.

> Can't edit kernel parameters from the firmware's own boot selector though can you.

Yes you could, if the firmware did let you change the Unicode string (some firmwares let you do crazy things)

> UEFI has effectively replaced all that with a proprietary boot process. The vendor is now in complete control; want a usable text console, or to access the firmware via an external monitor? Vendor doesn't give a shit. Want to access the boot loader via the serial console? Oh you must be an enterprise, let me direct you to our sales staff who won't give you the time of day unless you've got £thousands to drop into their pocket.

You are over dramatizing the current situation. Just boot to a UEFI shell and you can do all that. There are many.

If all you need is to edit the cmdline parameters, add an initrd containing a busybox + kexec to show the currently entered parameters and either keep booting as is, or edit them and kexec the kernel with the new parameters.

It's something a bit like what zfsbootmenu does to let you select the root filesystem you want, and it's much more powerful than a UEFI shell since you get the wide set of drivers linux suppors, and the even wider set of tools you can run on the commandline.

> Don't get me wrong, I'd love to replace GRUB with systemd-boot, but these are very real impediments to me ever doing so.

The #1 impediment seems to be your lack of desire to reclaim freedom, something easy to do if you spend a few hours learning about UEFI payloads, initrd, kexec etc.

Get in touch by email and I'll help you.

How would someone email you? No email in your profile.

username at outlook dot com

Speaking from my heart. There is a reason we have convoluted big software like GRUB - to have a single familiar software solution supporting wide range of broken hardware/firmware. Fixing all the firmware is theoretically correct and would be great, but hopelessly unrealistic in the present. We need change of culture in HW and FW vendors before we can say "that will be fixed by the firmware guys".

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