Lennart Pottering continued Publishing ideas for processing components for loading Linux and examined the situation with duplication of loading sections. Dissatisfaction was caused by the use of two disk sections with different FSs for organizing the initial load, which are mounted on the /Boot /EFI section based on FS VFAT with the EFI System Partition firmware and the /Boot section, BTRFS or XFS, on which placed the images of the Linux and Initrd nucleus, as well as the bootloader settings.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that the EFI section is common to all systems, and the loading section with the core and InitRD is created separately for each installed Linux distribution, which leads to the need to create unnecessary sections when installing several distributions in the system. In turn, the need to support different FS leads to the complication of the bootloader, and the use of the invested sections interferes with the implementation of automatic mounting (the section /boot /EFI can be targeted only after the section /Boot).
.
Lennart proposed to use only one boot section if possible on systems with EFI by default to place images with a nucleus and Initrd in the VFAT-section /EFI. On systems without EFI or if the section already exists during installation (another OS is used in parallel) and it does not have enough free space in it, you can use a separate /boot section with the XBOTLDR type (section /EFI has the ESP type). EFI and XBOOTLDR sections are proposed to create in separate catalogs (separate mounting /EFI and /Boot instead of invested mounts /boot /efi), make them auto -determined and automonated through the type of XBOOTLDR in the sections table (without prescribing the section B /ETC /FSTAB).
The section /Boot will be common to all Linux distributions installed on the computer, and the separation of specific images will be carried out at the level of subcatals (for each set distribution of its subcatalogs). In accordance with the prevailing practice and requirements of UEFI specification in the EFI component section, only the VFAT file system is used. To unify and relieve the bootloader from complications associated with supporting different FS, it is proposed to use VFAT and as a file system for section /BOOT, which will greatly simplify the implementation of the components working on the side of the bootloader that access data in the sections /Boot and /EFI. Unification will allow you to equally maintain both sections (/boot and/EFI) to download the nucleus and infer images and initrd.