Bug#783990: efivarfs is a separate fs and needs moutning

[Ian Jackson]

I have now tested this.  I found that a safety catch in
mount-functions caused it to not work, and this additional patch is
needed.

mount-functions looks in /etc/filesystems and skips mounting things
which the kernel doesn't seem to supoort.  In general with so many
filesystems being kernel modules this seems to be of questionable use.
In this case it definitely broke things: I found that mounting the
filesystem with mount(8) auto-loads the module.

I'm using the existence of the mountpoint directory as a proxy for the
filesystem/module being available.  IDK if that is exactly right, but
if it isn't the worst case is an error message about failing to mount
it.


For your testing:

AFAICT it isn't a particularly good idea to just copy the new
mount-functions.sh into /lib but monkey-applying the patch with

  patch /lib/init/mount-functions.sh < 0001-initsripts-mount-functions-Do-not-check-efivarfs-in-.patch

worked for me.  With those patches (and the bodge in fstab commented
it) it all works.


Impact on systems which don't need this efivars FS:

I'm pretty sure it will do the right thing on non-EFI systems
(nothing, silently).  I'm also confident that even if it does fail,
the consequences are just a message.

I'm not sure if it will work on non-Linux systems, or indeed whether
it's needed.  I think it most likely that they don't have a /sys laid
out like Linux so this won't do anything.  Again I think the
reasonable worst-case scenario is a boot-time message and a bug still
unfixed.

Ian.

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Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.  

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