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.
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.
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.
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 :))
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 :)
Fixed in CVS.
Great, the changes look good. Thanks swift.