I'm replying to a really old posting I made. [Mystery: I'm replying to the copy I sent. Formatting is screwed up when I reply to the copy I got back from the list server.] [I'm top posting because I'm just including it whole, for reference. I'm sure most of you have deleted it from you mailboxes after 4 years.] I followed the instructions on how to make /boot/esp mounted on demand, but I still have problems with my CentOS box not rebooting after a crash because the ESP is marked as dirty. "journalctl -b" says that it is mounting /boot/efi because packagekitd is requesting it Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com PackageKit[1855]: daemon start Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd[1]: Got automount request for /boot/efi, triggered by 1855 (packagekitd) Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd[1]: Starting File System Check on /dev/disk/by-uuid/A9B4-1C74... Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd-fsck[1866]: fsck.fat 3.0.20 (12 Jun 2013) Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd-fsck[1866]: /dev/sda1: 25 files, 2913/51145 clusters Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com chronyd[724]: Selected source 207.34.48.31 Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd[1]: Started File System Check on /dev/disk/by-uuid/A9B4-1C74. Aug 07 10:38:35 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd[1]: Mounting /boot/efi... Aug 07 10:38:36 reddoor.mimosa.com spice-vdagent[1942]: Cannot access vdagent virtio channel /dev/virtio-ports/com.redhat.spice.0 Aug 07 10:38:36 reddoor.mimosa.com gnome-session-binary[1460]: WARNING: App 'spice-vdagent.desktop' exited with code 1 Aug 07 10:38:36 reddoor.mimosa.com gnome-session-binary[1460]: Entering running state Aug 07 10:38:36 reddoor.mimosa.com gnome-session[1460]: gnome-session-binary[1460]: WARNING: App 'spice-vdagent.desktop' exited with code 1 Aug 07 10:38:36 reddoor.mimosa.com systemd[1]: Mounted /boot/efi. Fix: why the heck am I running packagekit? Stop that. $ sudo systemctl disable packagekit $ sudo systemctl stop packagekit $ sudo umount /boot/efi See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1991228 | From: D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> | To: Toronto Linux Users Group <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2017 13:12:11 -0400 (EDT) | Subject: war story: power failure makes CentOS system unbootable | | tl;dr / spoiler: change fstab so that /boot/efi is not automatically | mounted. See the recommendation at the end of this message. | | My gateway computer is a little PC running CentOS. | It does not come back after a power failure. | The reason (as best I can tell) is interesting and I think that I have a | fix. | | My system is UEFI. It boots from a UEFI system partition, known as | /boot/efi to Linux. If this gets corrupted, it won't boot. It is a | VFAT partition. | | On my gateway (a Zotac Zbox RI321, a cute little box with two ethernet | ports), the UEFI firmware apparently won't boot if the dirty bit is | set in the system partition. | | CentOS normally runs with /boot/efi mounted. So when the system isn't | shut down cleanly, the dirty bit will be on. | | Consequence: the system is not going to boot after a power failure. | | Odd observation 1: if I put a live Fedora 25 USB stick in the system | and try to boot in this otherwise-unbootable state, CentOS boots from | the main disk. So this really looks like a firmware bug/quirk. | | Odd observation 2: fsck doesn't seem to automatically fix the system | partition. Once CentOS 7 booted, I dismounted /boot/efi and | did an fsck on it. | | $ sudo fsck /dev/sda1 | fsck from util-linux 2.23.2 | fsck.fat 3.0.20 (12 Jun 2013) | 0x25: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt. | 1) Remove dirty bit | 2) No action | ? 1 | Leaving filesystem unchanged. | /dev/sda1: 16 files, 2420/51145 clusters | | Googling got me to <https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=50917> | In particular, this advice seemed quite good: | | ==== recommendation ==== | | Two other changes I recommend for UEFI systems, to each OS's /etc/fstab. | | - For the /boot/efi mountpoint, add the mount options | x-systemd.automount,noauto | | - Change fs_passno (last column) to a 1 or 2; the canonical fstab | instructions suggest 2, but systemd treats 1 and 2 as the same. | | The first change means the EFI System partition will not be automatically | read-write mounted at boot time; it's a bad idea this is the default | because it puts the ESP at risk especially if ther are crashes, FAT has no | journal and will therefore always be marked dirty in such a case; no other | UEFI OS mounts the ESP by default. Second, if anything tries to access | /boot/efi (read or write), systemd will automatically mount it, and | because of the fs_passno 1 or 2, it will fsck it first and that fixes and | clears the dirty bit in case it's set. | | Right now without these changes, it's just a matter of having the right | number and bad timing of crashes to render the EFI System partition | corrupt. |