I have recently setup my PC with F33 Silverblue Rawhide and switched to using the BTRFS filesystem. During this process, I have started to become re-familiar with boot loaders and Gub2 limitations, especially when using Silverblue. My system is BIOS not UEFI/EFI so some of the cool systemd-boot approaches don’t work for me. Currently I have my GPT partitioned disk set up with a BiosBoot partition a 1GB ext4 partition mounted as /boot, and the rest as BTRFS with subvolume /var on the spinning disk. This is working from the purely functional POV, but I would really like to theme my boot menu to say look like the Pip-boy from fallout say. Anyhow, all of the people that come to this site like to do things their own way, and I would think this includes how their system boots. So I am asking the community, how is your boot loader setup?
It is difficult to compile, but there is a patch for syslinux that will allow it to function as a drop-in replacement for systemd-boot on BIOS systems. I’ve been using it on several of my own BIOS systems ever since I wrote the patch. I think it would be awesome if Fedora included my patch in their binary release of syslinux. The patch is a bit crude because I am not a day-to-day C developer. I’m a sysadmin with a fairly old degree in Computer Science. I’m not guaranteeing that it works perfectly, but I’ve been using it without issue across many updates and upgrades of Fedora.
https://www.syslinux.org/archives/2019-July/026476.html
Using the above syslinux patch, /boot can be formatted with a FAT file system and a biosboot partition is no longer needed. The patch allows syslinux to read in the /boot/loader/entries/*.conf files so that Fedora’s normal BLS type 1 menu options will automatically appear and disappear from the boot menu without any further customization to the rest of Fedora.
Hello @glb,
Thanks for the idea, and the patch. I will check it out for certain.
If people want to try and compile syslinux with my patch, I they might need to checkout the syslinux-6.04-pre2 tag from the git repository. I think that is what I developed my patch against. Be warned, however, that I was later informed that that was an unstable release of syslinux. I don’t know what the issues are though and it has been working fine for me (though I’ve only been using a fairly limited subset of syslinux’s funciontionality; basically menu.c32 and vesamenu.c32; I also use syslinux over a serial connection on a few servers).
Also, I’ll try to attach my patch here to make it a little easier to download rather than having to scrape it out of the email archives. … Well, I was going to, but then it said only image were authorized for upload. So below is a link to it instead.
I press the power button. 
Jokes aside, most of my Fedora systems are BIOS boot, except for one system
that doesn’t support BIOS boot from internal, one where I don’t have BIOS or
UEFI, but rather boot directly to GRUB, and one ARM system with u-boot.
Please keep in mind that GRUB2 can read FAT partitions, and mostly supports
“BLS” as well.
Hello @JohnMH,
Thanks for posting your booting setup’s. I notice this …
Would you care to elaborate on this boot approach? I think it would be interesting to understand what you are doing to achieve this and what hardware this is being used on.
And jokes included, I thought powering on was obvious, thanks for reminding me of the need for explicit communication to fully convey ideas.