In the latest BalenaOS I noticed a new file /mnt/boot/EFI/BOOT/grub_extraenv (it may have been there before), which gets sourced in grub.cfg. So I added the mitigation switch available in kernels 5.2 and up like below:
extra_os_cmdline=“mitigations=off”
Can team balena confirm that /mnt/boot/EFI/BOOT/grub_extraenv will stay put between BalenaOS upgrades ?
Hi, currently changes in grub_extraenv are overwritten on host OS updates so this change will nor persist. I have opened an issue to fix this in https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/issues/2022.
However, be aware that these files are internal APIs that could change at any time. They are meant to only be modified by the supervisor through the dashboard/API. IN particular, the different environment files will be merged into a single file in the near future so I wouldn’t recommend to rely on this functionality in production use cases.
Thanks for the reply Alex. I need to be able to set Linux kernel parameters and re-using the existing environment settings workflow for that would be great. Adding a kernel-parameter variables settings capability to the dash for that would make sense to me.