On 10/19/25 11:36, Feli Flitzberg wrote:
> Hi, long time watcher, first time poster. If the bootloader supports the 
> Discoverable Partitions Specification, all that's needed is the correct 
> partition GUID assigned to every partition. After that, you don't need to 
> pass any partitions or use /etc/fstab as the bootloader will read the disk it 
> came from to mount everything. The only major limitation is that your 
> bootloader partition MUST live on the same disk as root and usr, otherwise 
> they won't be found. Hope this helps!

How can the OS know which block device the system was booted from?

> Feli Flitzberg
> 
> https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/discoverable_partitions_specification/
> 
> Sent from Proton Mail for iOS.
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> On Saturday, 10/18/25 at 19:50 Demi Marie Obenour <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> This isn't systemd-specific, but I know that at least some systemd
> developers recommend using UEFI secure boot + dm-verity, which leads
> to this problem.  I also don't know a better place to ask for help
> on this.
> 
> How do OSs using dm-verity and UKIs find the user data partition?
> On some systems it is trivial, as the storage device it must be on
> is known ahead of time.  However, desktops and servers can have many
> storage devices or even use RAID, making this very nontrivial.
> 
> Non-immutable OSs generally store this information in either the
> initramfs, root filesystem, or kernel command line.  However, with
> signed UKIs and dm-verity both the initramfs and root filesystem are
> provided by the OS vendor and can't be changed.  This means that one
> must load the user data partition to be able to read any data one
> has stored on disk, but one must read data stored by the installer
> to find the user data partition.  Circular dependency, whoops.
> 
> What is the standard solution to this problem, if any?  The only one I
> have come up with is UEFI variable storage, but I'm curious if there
> are others.
> --
> Sincerely,
> Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)
> 


-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)

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