Systemd-boot and sdubby

Support
1

Hi,
Now i am sorry if my question doesn’t make much sense, i am somewhat of a beginner when it comes to professional use of linux but i’ve had a bit of experience with Fedora and Fedora-based distros and as i am getting Alma on my work-pc soon i chose to test it out at my private PC first.

Now i wanted to set up systemd-boot (as grub is simply not needed for my case and, at my private pc, Alma is sharing a disk with other distros all started via Limine so systemdboot is simply faster) and in Fedora and Ultramarine i would usually do a bit of setup (which includes removing grub, grubby and the shims) and then install systemd-boot-unsigned as well as sdubby.

Before doing that however i wanted to check if the repositories even have all necessary packages and found out that the repositories don’t have sdubby.

Does anyone have an idea if sdubby is in a repo i haven’t seen yet or, the more likely case, point me in the direction of how to set up systemd-boot properly without sdubby?

Thanks in advance and have a good evening everyone.

2

Hi,

I do not think sdubby is available in the standard AlmaLinux repositories.

sdubby looks like a Fedora-side helper package for systemd-boot. Fedora describes it as “systemd-boot shimming utilities” and says the name is a play on grubby.

Source:

On RHEL / AlmaLinux-like systems, the standard bootloader management path is still based on GRUB / grubby. Red Hat documents grubby as the tool used to carry kernel command-line arguments forward when installing newer kernels.

Source:

systemd-boot itself can be installed/managed with bootctl, but without sdubby you would need to manage boot entries and kernel-update integration yourself.

Source:

So my recommendation would be:

  • For a work PC, keep GRUB2 / grubby.
  • If you still want systemd-boot, treat it as a custom/unsupported setup on AlmaLinux.
  • Before assuming it is missing, you can confirm with:
dnf repoquery sdubby
dnf search sdubby