On 13/12/2020 03:07, the...@sys-concept.com wrote:
if you have UEFI system most likely your "boot" partition is some form
of "vfat"
I strongly disagree with this statement. Most Linux distributions,
including Gentoo, advise (or outright default to) having your /boot
partition either separate, or having /boot as part of your root
filesystem. And this is very sensible indeed.
Personally, I would even go further by saying that /boot should be
journaled (e.g. ext4). Most distros do that by default.
A UEFI set-up only requires the EFI system partition to be vfat. It does
not require the kernel or the ramdisk to be on it. GRUB2 can be
configured to install only its own EFI-related files on the EFI system
partition, then reading the kernel and the grub config file from your
/boot partition:
# grub-install --efi-directory=/path/to/efi
--boot-directory=/boot/efi /dev/[nvme...|sd...]
You do not need CSM enabled for this.
Unfortunately, sometimes guides put the EFI partition mount point to be
a directory within the /boot directory (e.g. /boot/efi) which itself can
be the mount point for the boot partition. This can lead to people
formatting both as vfat or indeed using the EFI partition itself in lieu
of a separate /boot partition. I am not suggesting this is what happened
in your case, but I have seen it happen.
Now if you use a different boot loader (e.g. rEFInd) it is up to that
bootloader to have relevant support for the filesystem that your /boot
partition is using.
> fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24) open: no such file or directory
>
> There is a similar related bug filed about it (but I don't know why is
> it marked resolved)
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/306119
I don't think this issue is related wrt the root cause. But
force-checking for filesystem errors certainly revealed the issue for
your case: you don't have the fsck.fat binary in your initramfs. As a
result, the filesystem checking process fails, the boot process is
interrupted prematurely, and you're dropped into a shell to investigate.
This is normal behaviour when an error occurs before the boot process
switches to the real root.
One option is to disable filesystem checking for vfat - like you did,
another is to make sure that the mkfs.fat binary is included in the
ramdisk image. I am not sure how the latter would be best achieved with
genkernel, perhaps others can advise on this.
- Victor
