CloverBootloader VS sbctl

Definitely look into clover

You need to try and learn it ....clover is a bit eazy then OC https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader/wiki/Configuration

I did manage to get Clover to boot, turns out it was a graphics card issue (Clover does not boot on ProLiant DL 560 Gen 8) so I threw an old HD 3470 I had laying around in it and I can now access Clover. I gonna play with Clover a little and see if I can get it to do what I want and if not, I grab the Slim ODD to SATA adapter you mentioned. Just need to find the cables to connect it.

In your case you may wish to research using a tool such as Clover Bootloader, which would allow you to install Proxmox to NVMe drives and then put Clover on an internal or external USB thumb drive. The boot process would start from Clover on USB before linking your NVMe installation and continuing from there.

Clover bootloader https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader

You can use Clover to emulate UEFI on legacy BIOS computers.

Are there any other bootloaders I should be considering? My understanding was that LILO and BURG have essentially been abandoned so even if I were willing to rely on an abandoned project for something as important as the bootloader (I'm not btw) then it probably would not work with LUKS/Btrfs. While doing my initial research, I did come across Clover but I know even less about that than I do about Systemdboot and Refined. My initial impressions is that it seems very customizable theming-wise but it feels like maybe not too many people use it / I'd have a hard time finding help and that's IF it even supports LUKS/Btrfs.

You Clover outdated af (2017). Update to 5123.1, which is the last one with the old memory fixes: https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader/releases/tag/5123.1

No, this isn't true nor correct.

Secure Boot and TPM do offer tangible security benefits and is security features you can take ownership of.

Secure Boot allows your own key hierarchy, and TPM allows you to take ownership.

The linked boot disk isn't really proof that Secure Boot is useless. If you don't set a MOKManager password (as you should), and you change the security state of the machine while present at the keyboard. Yes you can boot things.

This is intended to make sure people can actually decide to trust things. And having insecure defaults makes this less useful. Not very surprising.

TPMs could also prevent attacks like this on your machine.

Incidentally I've invested quite a bit of time in making user-friendly Secure Boot tooling as well. https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

No problem! The sbctl package ships with a pretty extensive hook out of the box (https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/blob/master/contrib/pacman/ZZ-sbctl.hook). It's been very reliable for automatically resigning .efi executables after updates for me.

sbctl verify returns failed to find EFI system partition despite it definitely is there. It's the same issue as this but remounting or restarting doesn't fix it.

lol

Must actually prevent unsigned images from booting

sudo dnf install asciidoc golang -y VERSION=0.11 cd /tmp curl -L "https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/releases/download/${VERSION}/sbctl-${VERSION}.tar.gz" | tar zxvf - cd "sbctl-${VERSION}" make sudo make install cd ~

By far the easiest is to use sbctl to generate, install and use keys to sign your efi images. You can use mkinitcpio to build the unified kernels automatically and a pacman trigger to rerun the sbctl signing when the kernel is updated. Pretty straightforward (once you've done it once).

The question is whether you have any UEFI drivers or not. If they're in the ESP you can just look there to check, but UEFI drivers can also be loaded from PCI cards or baked in the firmware itself.

If you're using a TPM for Secure Boot, you can use the command in https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/wiki/FAQ#option-rom to know for sure.