Re: Redundant EFI Systemp Partitions (Was Re: How does one enable SCTERC on an NVMe drive (and other install questions))

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 8:21 PM Edward Kuns [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 10:14 PM Chris Murphy [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I think it's unreliable. GRUB can write to the ESP when grubenv is on
it. And sd-boot likewise can write to the ESP as part of
https://systemd.io/AUTOMATIC_BOOT_ASSESSMENT/

And the firmware itself can write to the ESP for any reason but most
commonly when cleaning up after firmware updates. Any of these events
would write to just one of the members, and involve file system
writes. So now what happens when they're assembled by mdadm as a raid,
and the two member devices have the same event count, and yet now
completely different file system states? I think it's a train wreck.

It sounds like the least risky option is just manually creating more
than one ESP and manually syncing them periodically as Andy Smith
mentioned.  (Or automatically syncing them upon every boot.)

                Eddie

I'd like to say we are definitely better off with stale ESPs
occasionally being used, than corrupt file systems. That's probably
almost always true.  But since fallback to another ESP can be silent,
without the benefit of any information from the pre-boot environment
ending up in the system journal to know which ESP booted the system,
it might be false comfort.




-- 
Chris Murphy