[CentOS] /boot on a separate partition?

[Robert Heller]

At Tue, 23 Jun 2015 13:49:08 +0100 CentOS mailing list <centos at 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 
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.

> 
> 

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