On Monday 27 August 2007, Mick wrote: > On Monday 27 August 2007, Neil Bothwick wrote: > > Alternatively, ditch a separate /boot altogether, it really isn't > > needed with modern hardware. > > Please tell us more.
Many many many years ago, back in the dark days of small drives and broken BIOSes, we all had a little problem at boot time. The BIOS was unable to read anything on the disk beyond what it thought was cylinder 1024 (it was a BIOS hard limit). So, no boot loader could find a kernel anywhere beyond that cylinder and if you weren't careful to make 100% sure the boot loader could find the kernel image, then the machine wouldn't boot. The solution is to create a small partition of around 50M-100M and make it the first. if you put your kernel images there, you are guaranteed that the BIOS will find them. Nowadays of course we know better. We still build drives with insane geometries, but they are saner than way back then. Today's boot loaders still have to cope with the insane x86 architecture, 16 bit code and all sorts of other wierd legacy baggage, but we did at least solve the hard drive limits thing. This happened around 1995 and no pc machine made since then has this problem that I have ever seen, so you don't really need a separate /boot for that reason. Some people still prefer to do it though. Most of them are like me (i.e. slightly off our rockers) are do stuff like 2 Linux OSs on one box, or just simply prefer to have the kernel images nice and safe in unwritable locations at run time. The first scenario is much easier with a shared /boot as you don't have to tiptoe around two / directories or get into silly schemes with two grubs, one in the MBR, one in a partition's boot sector and one of them the master (and then forget which one that was....) So there are good reasons for a separate /boot, but hardware limits isn't one of them. Unfortunately we have not yet taken this to it's logical conclusion yetand rid the planet entirely of that beast who should not be suffered to live called the BIOS.... But that's a different thread for a different time. alan -- Optimists say the glass is half full, Pessimists say the glass is half empty, Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be? Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
