[TriLUG] /boot Partition Sizes

[Greg Cox]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Jeremy Portzer wrote:

> itself, and the kernel images.  Certain BIOSes have restrictions on
> where they can read files from, and thus the /boot partition should be
> placed wholly within the first 1024 cylinders of your  hard drive. 
> Newer BIOSes usually do not have this restriction, so you often don't
> need a /boot partition at all.

There's a reason for /boot, even in the post-crap-BIOS world.
GRUB can figure out finding a kernel on a plain partition.
GRUB can figure out finding a kernel on a software RAID partition.
GRUB can't figure out finding a kernel on an LVM2 logical volume.

My server setup: 2 disks, 3 partitions on each disk.
md0 is a RAID1 for the first partitions and will be /boot;
#2 is swap on each;
md1 is RAID1 on the third, and is the PV for an LVM2 VG, from which
the filesystem (aside from /boot) is sliced.

--------------
$ df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/rootvg-root
                        297485    107812    174313  39% /
/dev/md0                 92963      6717     81446   8% /boot
none                    127996         0    127996   0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/rootvg-home
                       6047492     32828   5707464   1% /home
/dev/mapper/rootvg-usr
                       2015824    489364   1424060  26% /usr
/dev/mapper/rootvg-var
                       2015824    157032   1756392   9% /var
none                    127996         0    127996   0% /tmp
--------------

The beautiful part was that Fedora's installer did this right out of
the box.  Debian's wouldn't, not even an experimental one.