[PATCH v2 0/3] Add support for EFI file system transposition

[Pete Batard]

Changes from v1:
- Rebased against latest GRUB
- Validated patches against coding guidelines
- Clarified comments

Note: If you are interested in testing this series, I have jolted down some 
guidelines at:
https://gist.github.com/pbatard/0deddbd71eefc35a3ed0b08e12a9e7e3

------------------------------------------

Hello everyone,

This series of patches adds file system transposition support, for UEFI boot 
media created with grub-mkrescue.

File system transposition means the ability to take the content of a UEFI 
bootable media and copy it, at the file system level, to a partition that was 
independently created and formatted by the user, while preserving the ability 
of the media to boot in UEFI mode.

We see this as a much needed improvement to GRUB since one of the core concept 
of EFI is to do away with the requirement to have to create boot media at the 
block level, one of the major pain points of BIOS systems' users.

Currently, grub-mkrescue fails to meet the goal of UEFI file system 
transposition on 3 accounts:

1. It does not include file system support for FAT or NTFS, whereas these are 
the native file systems supported by UEFI (with FAT being mandatory per UEFI 
specs, and NTFS being found more and more commonly on x64 commodity hardware 
such as, from my direct experience, about any motherboards that has been 
produced by ASUS, Gigabyte or Intel in the past 10 years).

2. It uses a efi.img to embed the UEFI bootloaders, but does not keep a copy of 
these bootloaders on the ISO9660 file system itself, with the end result that, 
when copying the media at the file system level, the '/efi/boot/' directory and 
its content is missing.

3. It relies on volume UUID to locate the boot media, a method that does not 
survive transposition when the content is copied to a newly user-created 
partition.

The following patches fix each one of these issues. More specifically:

1. Adding fat and ntfs support can easily be added as additional modules and, 
considering that these are file systems natively supported on commonplace UEFI 
hardware, the benefits vastly outweighs the very limited increase in size.

2. Duplicating the 'efi.img' bootloaders onto the ISO9660 file system is also 
easily accomplished by dropping the use of a temporary directory to generate 
the 'efi.img' and instead moving copying that content to the ISO9660 root 
level. At this stage, we will point out that we consider it should really be 
the job of xorriso, rather than grub-mkrescue, to accomplish this duplication. 
There again, in terms of increase in size, we see the cost/benefit ratio as non 
issue.

3. Searching for the boot media is now carried out by looking for a 
'/.disk/<TIMEBASED_UUID>.uuid' file rather than an actual partition UUID, as 
real world usage does show that relying on specific labels or UUIDs being 
assigned to specific partitions is actually a brittle solution. We only apply 
these alterations for EFI boot, and don't modify the existing BIOS/Legacy media 
search method. It should also be noted that the reason we chose a '.disk/' 
directory to place the UUID file is because '.disk/' has become a de-facto 
standard to place disk related content for both Debian and Ubuntu, which, in 
the fragmented world of Linux distribution, is as good as a standard as you 
will get. We did briefly consider using '/System/', but decided against it as 
this latter directory is geared towards MacOS usage, and we see going with a 
more generic dot directory as a better approach. We have validated that, if the 
added content already contains a '.disk/' directory, then our new 
'.disk/#####.uuid' file does get properly merged with that content.

With these limited changes, grub-mkrescue can now be used to produce media that 
properly survives file system transposition, thereby satisfying one of the 
implicit goals of EFI of allowing end-users to carry out the creation of 
bootable EFI media at the file system level exclusively.



Now, because this is relevant to this patchset (it's pretty much the motivation 
behind it), and because it is my understanding that some of the people creating 
ISOHybrid boot media, especially if they are using UNIX derivatives as their 
main work environments, are not always aware of the issues that arise from 
treating ISOHybrid as a glorified dd image, I will use this opportunity to 
elaborate on issues that arise from dealing with ISOHybrid media that lacks 
support for file system transposition.

But first I should point out that these notes should not be construed as 
criticism of ISOHybrid per se, as we very much recognise the great benefits of 
ISOHybrid and the major technical achievements that went into it. We however do 
see it as important to try to debunk the idea that, once you have an ISOHybrid 
image that works well for both dd and optical, your job is done and remind 
people who place their trust in ISOHybrid image that, for the reasons 
highlighted below, having a working dd image is only half the job.

And so, without further ado:

* One massive real-world problem, that Linux-oriented people tend to ignore, is 
that for the most widely used Operating System out there (Windows) the 
"ISOHybrid = dd" approach is a *MASSIVE* pain point for users, on account that 
the resulting media is either something that Windows will not mount, or only 
mount the ESP of, with the direct result that a fair amount of users assume 
that their media was not properly created and, therefore, won't even try to 
boot it. I genuinely cannot stress enough how this is far from being a limited 
problem, or something that one should feel entitled to ask Windows users to 
"just plow through". See for instance [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], 
[9], [10], [11], [12] if you need some convincing, knowing that I could easily 
add a dozen more refs, and that I didn't have to look further than a couple 
days ago to find a recent one [4]. Thus, one of the results of *restricting* 
the creation of ISOHybrid media on Windows, through the use of block copy only, 
is a very poor first time experience for users of ISOHybrid-contained 
software...

* Having a file system transposable UEFI media does open the door to some very 
desirable usage, such as single media OS installation (See for instance the 
installation of vanilla Debian on Pi 4 using a single media as installer and 
target [13]), which can be critical for of users of SoC based systems that do 
not have the luxury or resources to run to their (not-always-so-local) corner 
shop in order to buy another flash drive. Currently, I don't really see 
dd-written ISOHybrid media being able to provide that kind of feature whereas 
it is easy envision all kind of other scenarios where file system transposition 
can be a boon for users, such as allowing the copying of non-free WiFi firmware 
blobs onto the boot media, in order to be able to proceed with a networked 
installation...

* Formatting a partition, and even repartitioning a drive, is typically a lot 
less error prone for non tech-savvy users than using a dd like utility, in 
terms of preventing the erasure of the wrong disk. This is especially true on 
non Linux platforms where GUI tools or context menus will usually guide the 
user into selecting the appropriate target.

* dd writing a GPT-based ISOHybrid media does result in a disk that has an 
invalid backup GPT, on account that one never has a media that is the exact 
same size as the original image, thereby resulting in garbage residing in the 
last 33 sectors of the disk. Some pedantic UEFI firmwares, as well as some 
ill-programmed OSes (e.g. Windows 7 will BSOD on this) may take objection to an 
improper backup GPT...

* As mentioned earlier, one of the established goals of EFI was to get rid of 
the requirement to write any parts of a media at the block level to make it 
bootable. As such, it has been quite surprising to see a lot of the proponents 
of ISOHybrid pushing towards a complete 180 on this goal, by enforcing the use 
of block level tools. This is even more problematic as, for Windows users, this 
means installation of third-party software, which some users may rightfully 
take objection to, in terms of not adding potential holes into a trust chain 
that is critical for OS installation.

* Finally, there's really no reason why GRUB (and by extension Linux) boot 
media should remain inferior to Windows boot media in that respect, since 
Windows installation ISOs have been supporting EFI file system transposition 
for years. Thankfully, some major Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu 
and (for the most part) Arch, have grasped the importance of file system 
transposition for their ISOHybrid media, and are making a concerted effort to 
support it. But we do feel that it should very much have been the job of GRUB 
to lead the way in that respect.

Regards,

/Pete


[1] 
https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/j4nolf/creating_a_bootable_usb_drive_for_linux
[2] 
https://old.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/gofq71/problem_with_rufus_310_and_manjaro_2001
[3] 
https://old.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/gjdpi4/cannot_create_bootable_usb_usb_size_shrinks_after
[4] 
https://old.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/v2en1r/proxmox_couldnt_find_iso_before_launching_setup/iarz6hb/?context=3
[5] 
https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/499b5c/usb_stick_capacity_shrunk_to_2mb
[6] 
https://superuser.com/questions/752874/16-gb-usb-flash-drive-capacity-down-to-938-mb
[7] 
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/usb-flash-drive-8gb-is-now-only-1gb.660997/
[8] https://www.eassos.com/blog/how-to-restore-usb-drive-back-to-full-capacity
[9] https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/fix-usb-drive-incorrect-size.html
[10] 
https://www.quora.com/After-making-my-32-GB-pen-drive-Kali-Linux-bootable-its-size-reduced-to-712-KB-Is-it-normal-If-not-then-how-can-I-fix-it
[11] 
https://askubuntu.com/questions/289971/usbs-storage-capacity-reduced-to-2-mb-from-16-gb
[12] 
https://askubuntu.com/questions/611325/capacity-of-pen-drive-shown-is-less-than-the-actual
[13] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=282839


Pete Batard (3):
  grub-mkrescue: Add support for FAT and NTFS on EFI boot
  grub-mkrescue: Preserve a copy of the EFI bootloaders on the ISO9660
    file system
  grub-mkrescue: Search by file UUID file rather than partition UUID for
    EFI boot

 util/grub-mkrescue.c | 60 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----------
 1 file changed, 47 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)

-- 
2.36.0.windows.1