On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
At Tue, 23 Jun 2015 13:49:08 +0100 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Do most people today have /boot on a separate partition, or do they (you) have it on the / partition ?
The default CentOS installer always puts /boot on a separate partition. This is mostly because, the default CentOS installer uses LVM for the bulk of the disk and Grub is *generally* clueless WRT LVM (at least Grub V1, not sure how smart Grub V2 is). Also, there are lots of 'fun' options for what/where the
Accessing /boot within LVM was not possible with legacy GRUB (GRUB1) GRUB2 is much "smarter".
I've done a few Debian installs (VMs) with /boot as part of the root partition which was an LV. Those were done as a proof-of-concept, but it also reduced "wasted" space which would otherwise only be usable within the file system for /boot. And the flexibility of having everything a part of LVM (which is great if the file systems in use support shrinking).
I'd expect GRUB2 in CentOS7 would allow for /boot within LVM, though I have not tried it.
root partition can be, not all of them compatible with what Grub (or other boot loaders) know how to deal with. Having /boot on its own (small) partition, using something 'simple' for a file system makes things 'easy' for bootloaders. Once the kernel is fired up it can load all sorts of modules to allow it to mount the root file system, everything from exotic file systems to LVM and RAID, etc.
Another advantage of having /boot on its own partition is supporting multiple linux flavors that is, it is possible to 'share' /boot between CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. if one wants to, although it is really easier to pick one system for your 'host' and then install VMs for all of the others, but sometimes one needs to test things with different Linux flavors *on the bare metal* for various reasons.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 Deepwoods Software -- Custom Software Services http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Linux Administration Services heller@deepsoft.com -- Webhosting Services
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