[Bug 1876974] Re: Support multiple ESPs

[Johan Ehnberg]

The situation where this arose is in testing our Ubuntu 20.04
orchestration. Previously we used a script to ensure boot coherence. We
use two mirrored system drives, mirroring everything to the extent that
the system must be completely bootable after pulling a drive/having one
drive fail completely.

The situation where it becomes tempting to re-run grub-install, is when
such a drive is replaced with an empty one. Our previous setup simply
copies the ESP over, so when the partition exists and is mounted, it
simply works.

I am perfectly happy with doing this using dpkg. However, I do not see
how it would recognize the new partition identifiers? 'dpkg-reconfigure
grub-efi-amd64' only seems to offer existing GRUB EFI system partitions.
Maybe documenting the intended workflow would help us admins in such
cases.

For some reason, the installer also records the drives differently (both are 850 EVO), but in essence, I am guessing simply getting the new drive's partition registered here should do the trick:
$ sudo debconf-show grub-efi-amd64 | grep devices:
* grub-efi/install_devices: /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-1ATA_Samsung_SSD_850_EVO_250GB_S2R6NXAH352264N-part1, /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5002538d40c10167-part1

So the issue boils down to the same point I made above: making admins
able to utilize this great feature. Do admins need to first manually
install grub or copy over the contents on that new partition for it to
be recognized in dpkg-reconfigure? Where is it documented or visible?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1876974

Title:
  Support multiple ESPs

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Subiquity has the brilliant feature of supporting installing to
  multiple ESP's. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/subiquity/+bug/1817066
  for details.

  grub-install does not mirror this feature this out of the box, but
  updates the ESP on /boot/efi only by default on such an installation.
  Whenever efi potentially changes, this leaves the backup ESP without
  the update.

  Adding this support would be coherent, since an admin may logically
  assume the install mode is supported beyond the installation phase.

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