LPC: Booting and systemd [LWN.net]

LPC: Booting and systemd

Posted Sep 19, 2011 9:33 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: LPC: Booting and systemd by Cato
Parent article: LPC: Booting and systemd

The difficulty is in having a separate /boot at all. You must allocate a fixed amount of space which is either too little or too much. With a 500 gigabyte disk it doesn't matter but on a netbook with a four gigabyte SSD it is painful to lose 10% of it to /boot.

Earlier Fedora releases gave about a hundred megs to /boot but then cannot be upgraded to the latest Fedora version, since the upgrade process needs to put a disk image in there too. (There is a way to download the disk image over the network but for me it always hangs.)

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LPC: Booting and systemd

Posted Sep 20, 2011 9:56 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

If your only disk is a 4GB SSD on a notebook, don't use a separate /boot - just use ext3. You probably won't need LVM either.

LPC: Booting and systemd

Posted Sep 20, 2011 16:06 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

When I had my 4GB SSD netbook, I did something like a 70MB ext2 /boot, 2GB /, 512MB of swap, and the rest for /home. If everything were /, I would have to format anyways for an upgrade (not enough space for the RPMs to upgrade with[1]). I also remember doing lvresize and other fun things to go from a 2GB /home to a 2GB / instead. Haven't used LVM since.

[1]I actually did do a yum upgrade (from F10 to F11 IIRC) on the machine. The RPMs fit, but not with the upgrade going. I ended up having to SIGSTOP yum, delete cached RPMs that had finished installing for disk space, and the SIGCONT yum again. Not something I plan on doing again. Especially during class.