RAID + UEFI

[Alexander Thomas]

What a brilliant design to bind tab to “move focus to send button” and
also bind space to “push button”. Sorry for the incomplete message,
here is a second attempt:

We are trying to provide a FAI-based installer for several different
scenarios. One of those scenarios is software RAID inside a UEFI
environment. Since we already have a working configuration for the
RAID + BIOS/MBR case, and also a working configuration for the
non-RAID UEFI case, we thought it would be relatively easy to
configure the RAID+EFI case, but this is of course not as trivial as
it first seemed.

The current attempt at a configuration is the following (this is for
installing on a single disk only, such that the second RAID disk can
optionally be added later).

disk_config disk1 disklabel:gpt bootable:1

# /boot/efi
primary -  512M     -  -
# /boot
primary -  512M     -  -
# swap:
primary -  1G-4G    -  -
# /
primary -  30G-     -  -

disk_config raid fstabkey:uuid

raid1   /boot/efi  disk1.1  vfat  rw
raid1   /boot      disk1.2  ext2  rw,noatime
raid1   swap       disk1.3  swap  sw
raid1   /          disk1.4  ext4  noatime,rw


An important question is whether the EFI system partition can be
inside the RAID. This seems to be asking for trouble, but on the other
hand it would be useful to have the advantages of RAID1 for this
partition as well. Is there a way to make this work (and not only on
specific systems)?
If on the other hand /boot/efi cannot be inside the RAID, is there any
sane way to keep it synchronized across multiple disks?

Another question, not sure if it is related or not: when trying the
above config, it fails with a rather vague error:
  Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
  efibootmgr: option requires an argument -- 'd'
If this is not caused by the efi partition being inside the RAID, then
what causes it?


Regards,

Alexander Thomas