Following on from the recent discussions on grub and booting, is there a good reason for having a separate partition for /boot, other than perhaps to overcome BIOS addressing limitations for people with very large root partitions??
The reason I ask is that I am quite particular about my partitioning scheme, and have lots of reasons for wanting a lot of separate partitions, but have never really felt the need for a separate /boot partition... For instance: 1. / obviosly has to exist and provide a self contained standalone system capable of repairing and mounting all the rest of the filesystems. It is also fairly static if /tmp is kept off it (I have /tmp as a sym link to /var/tmp, with /var/tmp being a writable directory on the root filesystem giving me temporary storage before the /var filesystem is mounted. 2. /var must be separate because I want some writeable storage for the system. 3. /usr has most of the system files that don't have to be on the root partition, and usually is pretty static and can be mounted read-only for security and faster booting after a crash. (there isn't much point in having /bin and /usr/bin if they are on the same partition..) 4. /home is separate because we need a read/write partition for users, and it can be mounted nodev and sometimes nosuid for security. It also simplifies upgrades to separate personal data from distribution files. 5. I need a partition for swap... 6. I like to make /usr/local a separate partition because it contains things that are not part of the OS distribution. 7. /opt is separate to keep the size of the root partition down. 8. /tmp is separate as previously mentioned. In addition, my making /var and /home the only partitions that are normally read/write, I avoid the need for regular backups on the remainder. I suppose I have an instinct to be miserly with partitions because of my previous experience of BSD based systems which have a limited number of them on a disk (8, but only 6 are really usable because one is the raw 'entire disk' partition, and one is usually needed for swap). But dedicating a partition to the boot process seems clumsy to me. I have seen mention of not mounting your boot partition as being seen as in some way improving security - but I certainly can't see it as being anywhere near the most sensitive data on a root filesystem.. Anyway, my preference is to have my boot files on my root partition, and to keep it small enough to be directly addressable by the BIOS in its entirety. (my current 2M root is only 69% full and hardly ever changes). But the concept of a separate boot partition seems so ingrained in the Gentoo docs it makes me wonder what need I am overlooking. Or is it just to keep the people that want to put an entire system all in one big partition out of trouble? Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digbyt.com -- [email protected] mailing list
