[clug] separate boot partition?

[Andrew Janke]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 15:15, Michael James <clug3 at james.st> wrote:
> Is there ANY reason to still have boot in a separate partition?

I thought the best reason was to make it harder to fix things when you
stuff up UUID's in grub/fstab configs?

I take things even further these days and not even bother with a swap
partition, I am told that nowdays a swap file has a negligible
performance hit so I have a little script like this:

---

cai-harold:bin# cat mkswap.sh
#! /bin/sh

defaultsize=2048
swapdir="/"

size=${1:-$defaultsize}
swapfile=${swapdir}SWAP-${size}MB

# check if the swap file exists and make it if not
if [ -e $swapfile ]
then
   echo "Swapfile $swapfile exists, dying ungracefully"
   exit
else
   dd if=/dev/zero of=$swapfile bs=1M count=$size
   mkswap $swapfile
   swapon $swapfile
fi

# add an fstab entry if needed
echo >> /etc/fstab
echo "# Swap file" >> /etc/fstab
echo "$swapfile none swap sw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

---

I do still have a separate /tmp partition though.

> PS: When setting up a dual boot system,
>  I like slipping a little ext2 boot/grub partition
>  in front of the Windows NTFS partition.
> Windows can't read it, so it doesn't get upset,
>  and leaves me cleanly* in control** of the boot process.
>
> Is this a reason to still have a boot partition?

Well I think the real question is "is there any reason for a windows
partition?" the answer to this is no, and thus you don't need a boot
partition.


a