Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience [LWN.net]

Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience

Posted Mar 13, 2013 14:03 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience by Yenya
Parent article: Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience

> I'd rather see Fedora to focus on restoring Anaconda into usable state (i.e. supporting more than one DE install, and support for custom disk layout including MD RAID and LVM on top of each other, etc.). There are _way_ bigger problems to solve in Fedora than how many graphics mode changes occur during the system boot.

I installed F18 from scratch in a VM recently and the new Anaconda wasn't really compelling (all my other Fedora machines are either yum upgrade'd or Rawhide). I couldn't convince the partitioning step to set the default layout then let me edit it. Even when I did do it manually, I didn't see any way to order partitions on the disk (/boot should certainly be first), it just listed them. Other than that, buttons weren't in consistent places. Sometimes there was a "Done" where I would expect "Back" and others "Done" was at the bottom (at least I think so).

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Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience

Posted Mar 13, 2013 15:30 UTC (Wed) by duffy (guest, #31787) [Link]

I'm real confused - what does the parent article have to do with the installer?

Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience

Posted Mar 13, 2013 15:40 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

From Yenya above:

> I'd rather see Fedora to focus on restoring Anaconda into usable state

I was agreeing, with some more details as to what, specifically, I saw that weren't the best.

Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience

Posted Mar 13, 2013 16:35 UTC (Wed) by duffy (guest, #31787) [Link]

I think we have plenty of feedback on the installer interface to be muddying the waters on a boot experience discussion with yet more.

Duffy: Improving the Fedora boot experience

Posted Mar 13, 2013 22:58 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> I'm real confused - what does the parent article have to do with the installer?

It would certainly be useful to my boot experience to have a installer that actually is able to select and install a bootloader properly.

My motherboard is unfortunately made to be retarded by having a BIOS-only interface on some sort of gimped EFI firmware. Only BIOS functions are exposed. It is part of some sort of multi-level marketing scam or something.. I suppose the manufacturer is trying to differentiate this relatively low-end motherboard with their high-end stuff with fancy graphical firmware UI.

Basically, Fedora tries to install a EFI bootloader to a system that can't actually boot it. You have to use a BIOS bootloader.

Which is no big deal.

I normally have no problem setting up a bootloader.

Unfortunately I am also using large drives so I need to use GPT partition scheme, which then requires me to have small Bios partition at the beginning of the system to be compatible with BIOS systems.

This is a configuration I couldn't figure out how to coax Fedora into using. Fedora can install to a BIOS system just fine and setup the grub-bios partition for GPT drives, but since it was thought that it was a EFI system it did no such thing.

And thus it rendered my system unbootable.

I spent a day trying to figure this out. I tried various approaches, including trying to use parted from the installer's command line to setup partitions... which still wasn't accepted by Fedora's installer.

The solution was to let the baby have it's bottle: Let Fedora setup a EFI boot partition, boot partition, swap partition, then a data partition. Let it install and leave me with a nice brand new install on a completely unbootable PC.

Then boot the cd back up using the installer, copy the data off the boot partition, use blow away the first 2 partitions and then the new bios grub and boot partitions. Chroot insto the drive, restore the /boot contents to their proper locations, uninstall the efi bootloader, install the grub boot loader, install the grub boot loader, and then everything was all happy-joy-joy from then on.

I also took the opportunity to setup the boot and swap partitions on MD raid and extending my BTRFS system to be mirrored on my second drive so that the system could boot from either drive and quite happily survive a disk failure.

So that is what I was thinking when I replied:

"It would improve my boot experience to have a system that after I installed it could actually boot".

Besides the drive partition bit I am actually quite satisfied by the installer. I don't have too much angst over the issue because I know the partition druid (or whatever they are going to call it now) is going to be MUCH MUCH better in the next release. They have to start somewhere and disk partitioning is NOT a easy thing to do.