On 12/12/2020 11:00 PM, Victor Ivanov wrote: > 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
You are absolutely correct. I'm an old timer, before there was no need for initramfs. One of my 10-year old system is still running /boot with ext2; never had a problem. HD is making noise and they system was running 24/7. But it is slowly failing, might be HD or memory. I was following the Gentoo handbook, maybe I didn't read it correctly and/or miss the information on alternative setting. I didn't see any explanation that I need to have support for "fsck.fat". I better stay away from any "vfat" format on boot partition, and I don't see a reason to have initramfs (another complexity).
