New Install Not Booting

[lone holly]

Setup...

• LVM on LUKS FDE
• Systemd + Secure Boot & Shims
• Refind + Systemd-boot
• booster + booster-um
• /efi on UEFI GPT

Issue...

• [SOLVED: ESP:/boot/efi) /efi] Refind is unable to locate the /boot folder because ESP is /efi. Images, vmlinuz-Linux, and microcode are automatically installed at /boot.
• [SOLVED: booster + booster-um.yaml] When systemd-boot boots, no decryption method is requested for root partition.
• Presented with err-19 at boot and nothing else besides alt-ctrl-delete.
• I am trying to use the systemd auto generated partition discovery and mounting rather than using fstab to mount everything.

The reason I am using Refined over Systemd-boot or efibootmgr is for usb live booting (perfect example of arch-chroot). I don't believe systemd-boot provides an auto listing and mounting of only bootable USBs, otherwise lmk.

[lone veldt]

the simplest way to fix it is to make /boot the EFI partition

otherwise you need a separate /boot partition along with the EFI partition and that is just a mess

this is because no bootloader (other than maybe GRUB) can access your /boot as it is now

(and relying on GRUB’s featureset for this is another mess I do not like)

alternatively if you really want /boot to not just be the root of the EFI partition, you might consider bind mounting /efi/EFI/Arch onto /boot or something similar

that way the files in /boot are neatly contained in the EFI partition and don’t clutter the root of it

[lone holly]

Hmmm, so that is why the archwiki is bias towards recommending grub as the default bootloader.

I too, don't like the entire grub clunkiness and mess, and resorted to refind as my simplified automated manager. However, refind does have a scan extra directories flag which is set, but that too didn't seem to scan for /boot sadly.

Guess the defacto is /boot/efi....
Would this be as simple as just moving the entire /efi into /boot for /boot/efi and setting the ESP on /boot/efi or /boot

[lone holly]

Update...
Renamed /efi to /boot so I didn't have to reformat with ef00. Moved everything from /efi into /boot/efi. Everything in /boot merged correspondingly. Bootctl states ESP is now /boot ✅. I uninstalled and reinstalled microucode just to verify /boot directory is default, which it is.

I forgot that booster-um auto removes/generates/signs all kernels to now /boot/efi/Linux/kernels.efi. Therefore only microucode.img is in /boot. Does this mean that /boot/efi/Linux/kernel.efi is the new loader or initrd; along with initrd /boot/microucode.img?

[lone holly]

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/s/Dv7E7aoAPo

This was what I was trying to accomplish by not having the need for /boot since booster just builds .efi kernels to /efi mount if it were the ESP. AND automatically deletes everything in /boot anyways.

[lone veldt]

the thing is booster-um makes UKIs it seems

the idea is that a UKI should have everything needed to boot

so it should include both booster’s initramfs and the microcode image, but I’m not sure whether booster-um can be configured to do that

you could fall back to manually configuring ukify to do this instead of relying on booster-um, but I’m not sure how seamless that option is either

and if you are indeed using UKIs, there is no need to access those files in /boot – I wasn’t aware that you were intending to use UKIs though since your problem description stated you were trying to get your bootloaders to access /boot

[lone holly]

Sorry for the missed confusion, and no worries, yes I am using UKIs instead of initramfs images and whatever vmlinuz was again. However, I also concluded having two folders in same partition just for booting is unnecessary atm. Since amd-ucode in my case and similar efi files used for testing hardware are always installed to /boot, regardless how many times I deleted /boot.

Part of journey was a bigger bite than I anticipated or planned for so this was a massive learning curve for me. Therefore, sorry for the lack of intelligence of diagnosing my frustrations lol.

As of currently, I finally was able have refind do what it was supposed to do and ready everything in correctly.

However, I am still faced with my decryption prompt during boot for my lvm on luks not appearing. I can't tell if this is an fstab or crypttab issue?

[lone veldt]

this would depend on how you configured your initramfs

unfortunately I’m not familiar with how booster does it

hm, so it uses kernel parameters

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Booster#Encryption

booster doesn’t seem to do crypttab in the initramfs stage to my knowledge, so you’ll need to specify the rd.luks.name=…=… thing