On Friday 13 June 2008, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > > Earlier instances of the same problem. The 8 GiB barrier was because > > of the BIOS only issuing one 24-bit ATA command. I'm not sure how > > common will the new limit be in comparison. > > As well as 518MB, 2GiB, 32GiB, 64GiB, 128GiB. PC BIOSes are just > riddled with those stupid problems. Yep. > >> I wonder what we should do about this: > >> - just always create a /boot partition when guided partitioning is > >> used > > There is only one reason to have a seperate /boot: / is crypted. And > then you always need one. And LVM when used with some/most bootloaders, and most RAID setups. > In all other cases a small / partition is the superior solution imho. > > So my solution would be to default to a seperate small / partition at > the start of the disk unless crypted is selected and then start with a > small /boot. That may still not solve the problem for one important class of installs though: dual boot systems where the size of $other_os partition + the / partitions exceeds what the BIOS supports. > The risk of detection problems certainly outweighs the drawbacks of > always having a small / or /boot. The disadvantage of that (assuming you want to avoid LVM) is that for a really small / you'll need at least separate /var, /usr, /tmp, /srv and /home partitions and then you have the question what the best relative sizes are for that particular user. Here's a wild idea that could be used to work around that. Create two partitions: / and a partition e.g. "/media/multifs". And then bind mount all other partitions inside the second one. /etc/fstab would look something like this: <snip> # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda1 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1 /dev/hda3 /media/multifs ext3 defaults 0 2 /dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0 /media/multifs/home /home ext3 bind 0 0 /media/multifs/srv /srv ext3 bind 0 0 /media/multifs/usr /usr ext3 bind 0 0 /media/multifs/var /var ext3 bind 0 0 /media/multifs/tmp /tmp ext3 bind 0 0 </snip> I've tested this and it actually seems to work. If people like this idea, all we'd need is to add support for it in partman :-) One added advantage would be short fsck times for /. Cheers, FJP
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