Subject: Re: Could not prepare Boot variable

From: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:55:49 -0500

On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 10:06:19AM +0200, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> While I like the adherence to upstream's decisions and not doing
> downstream development through patches, in this case we should try to
> remove the footgun that has bit us multiple times in the past.
>
> What if we leave the kernel config as-is but add
> efi_pstore.pstore_disable=1 as a default kernel argument during boot?

I've pushed the patch in #75808 to the 'kernel-updates' branch as commit
4f30f754e7f12b81cb8b9d9cc5bc24ad83c41681 in order to test the build on
our build farm. It will appear here shortly:

https://ci.guix.gnu.org/jobset/kernel-updates

I do wonder about the right place to make this change. Currently we can
make special changes to the kernel configuration in two ways:

1) at build time, in ((gnu packages linux) default-extra-linux-options)
2) at run time, in ((gnu system) %default-kernel-arguments)

In both cases, the system administrator can override the setting during
boot.

Is there a good reason to choose one or the other? If not, I'm inclined
to choose the former (build time), since that is where the bulk of these
special changes are currently made. It seems icky to have two lists. We
can leave the list of run-time settings for things cannot be configured
at build time, like modprobe blacklisting.

Your thoughts?

PS, I sent this message twice because I forgot to CC the patch tracker
and I want this message to appear there too.