On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Jonathan Billings billings@negate.org wrote:
On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 01:27:47PM -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
It's bad design. First, it's a nested mount: file system A on /, and file system B on /boot, and file system C on /boot/efi. Therefore the mount process must make sure they're mounted in that order, or there's failure.
I've never once had a problem with nested mounts. Is this a problem people have? First I've heard of it.
You can't have an automount point nested on an automount point. Namely /boot in this case, which for the same reasons should also not be persistently mounted.
Second, there is no good reason for the EFI System partition to ever be mounted; and multiple reasons to not ever mount it (Windows and OS X never mount the EFI System partition but somehow all the Linux distros are obsessed with mounting things that don't need mounting). Eventually systemd will become smarter and handle on-demand dynamic mount and umount, including the ESP so this will get better but even better would be not ever mounting it in the first place.
It would be nice if that were the case, however, in an automated dual-boot system with EFI, we have to manage rEFInd *somewhere*, and it is easier for us to manage it under configuration management in Linux than in Windows. Our managed dual-boot workstations need to be able to reboot into the other OS during the evening for updates.
This makes no sense to me. rEFInd dynamically discovers linux kernel updates, it doesn't need any regular configuration file changes. Once you configure it, it's a static configuration file unlike grub.cfg or extlinux.conf.
So why do you need /boot/efi persistently mounted? You don't even need what GRUB users ought to have which is fstab using mount options noauto,x-systemd.automount for /boot/efi.