[clug] separate boot partition?

[Tony Breeds]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 03:15:53PM +1000, Michael James wrote:
> Is there ANY reason to still have boot in a separate partition?
> 
> In the dark ages of BIOSs that couldn't understand
>  deep disk geometry, it protected you when upgrading kernels.
> 
> Even after that, installs with a separate boot partition
>  hibernated and resumed faster for some reason.
> 
> Nowadays Ubuntu wants to store every kernel it ever ran
>  and my 64 Meg boot partitions are looking very yesterday.
> 
> Are they?

The main reason I use a seperate boot partition is if I want a "fancy" block
device for my root or if I want to use a filesystem that not supported by my
bootloader.

An example of a fancy block device might be LVM over software RAID.  For sometime
ext4 wasn't supported by grub (or yaboot) so if I wanted ext4 on my root FS I
needed a seperate /boot filesystem.

But it's getting harder and harder to size /boot as the distros keep doign
strange stuff with it.  Preciscly because it's typically a primary partition
with a well understood filesystem.

Yours Tony