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Bug 19385 - /boot is recommended to be 100M
Summary: /boot is recommended to be 100M
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: [OLD] Docs-user
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Gentoo Linux x86 Installation Guide (show other bugs)
Hardware: All Linux
: High minor (vote)
Assignee: Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED)
URL: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2003-04-15 17:36 UTC by Mr. Bones. (RETIRED)
Modified: 2003-05-08 04:01 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---


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Description Mr. Bones. (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-04-15 17:36:06 UTC
The kernel isn't even 1M.  It seems silly to recommend that people install
a 100M boot partition.  Even if they wanted to install every single stable
kernel it wouldn't fill up 100M.

I recommend we change the install doc to instruct the user to create a 16M boot
partition.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. URL covers it.


Actual Results:  
Told to create a 100M boot partition.

Expected Results:  
Told to create a 16M boot partition.
Comment 1 Robin Johnson archtester Gentoo Infrastructure gentoo-dev Security 2003-04-15 21:29:40 UTC
I believe that some of the reasoning behind a 100mb /boot partition is that some of the journalling filesystems take up a large chunk of space on their own. Reiserfs is a good example I have found. The default journal is 32mb in size on a 100mb partition. That is definetly too large. It wouldn't even fit on your 16mb partition. I'm not sure how much XFS/JFS use.

I would concede that 100mb is quite large, and possibly 64mb is more reasonable.
Comment 2 Aron Griffis (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-04-15 21:33:45 UTC
In that case, we should probably document what you just mentioned, and suggest that a 16M ext2 partition is probably the right choice.  Clearly it's a huge waste to allocate so much space to the boot partition.  I typically use the size Michael mentioned with ext2.
Comment 3 Frantz Dhin 2003-04-16 00:03:53 UTC
I do not wholly agree. The purpose of the boot partition is to contain whatever it takes to get a minimal system up and running. When a root partition is present then fine, only a bootloader and a kernel which totals <2m is needed, + of course journal and inode table. However if s**t hits the fan and the boot partition is all you have to use possible recovery and diagnostics tools with then you _might_ (or might not) be happy that your boot partition doesnt only consist of the bare minimum of resources necessary to boot up your system in conjunction with a root partition. 
As I myself am in the habit of only partitioning my harddrives once for the duration of their lifetime I like to have this flexibility and I cannot really predict what demands are put on my boot partition a few years from now. I find these +/- 50mb we are talking about highly negotiable on a 20gb harddrive. 
Anyways, fact of the matter is that I find advicing for this kind of tweaking of storage media wrong. Taking up a short discussion in the install guide wouldnt hurt, but having a lot of users blindly create 32mb boot partitions would be unfortunate. 
btw who says excess space on boot partition is a waste? Put your holiday pictures there or something :))
Comment 4 Frantz Dhin 2003-04-16 00:09:35 UTC
I do not wholly agree. The purpose of the boot partition is to contain whatever it takes to get a minimal system up and running. When a root partition is present then fine, only a bootloader and a kernel which totals <2m is needed, + of course journal and inode table. However if s**t hits the fan and the boot partition is all you have to use possible recovery and diagnostics tools with then you _might_ (or might not) be happy that your boot partition doesnt only consist of the bare minimum of resources necessary to boot up your system in conjunction with a root partition. 
As I myself am in the habit of only partitioning my harddrives once for the duration of their lifetime I like to have this flexibility and I cannot really predict what demands are put on my boot partition a few years from now. I find these +/- 50mb we are talking about highly negotiable on a 20gb harddrive. 
Anyways, fact of the matter is that I find advicing for this kind of tweaking of storage media wrong. Taking up a short discussion in the install guide wouldnt hurt, but having a lot of users blindly create 32mb boot partitions would be unfortunate. 
btw who says excess space on boot partition is a waste? Put your holiday pictures there or something :))
Comment 5 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-04-16 02:26:00 UTC
I do believe that assigning 100 Mb is too much. Perhaps, as Aron said, we could explain that a journaled fs takes about 32-33 Mb for the journal itself by default, so that, if you want to use journaled fs on /boot, you'd add 33 Mb, otherwise take 20 Mb.

And concerning /boot containing everything to get a minimal system up: no, sorry, don't agree. /boot and / are necessary to get a minimal system up (single user mode). If your / is corrupted, use a live rescue disk, but don't go clutter up /boot.

A /boot contains preferably:
- vmlinuz-* (kernels)
- System.map-* (symbol references for the kernels)
- initrd-* (initrd's for the kernels)
- kernel.config-* (kernelconfigs)
- grub/* (grub configuration and files - if you use GRUB, that is :)

I wouldn't have a clue on what you would like to add there. 

My vacation pictures go online from /data, btw :)
Comment 6 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-05-08 02:59:42 UTC
Fixed in CVS.
Comment 7 Mr. Bones. (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2003-05-08 04:01:18 UTC
Great, the changes look good.

Thanks swift.