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Bug#1076617: marked as done (installation-guide: Severely outdated information wrt partitioning)



Your message dated Sat, 19 Jul 2025 22:57:03 +0200
with message-id <DBGBYYL5C45D.2H1YKHTEDNEZB@cknow.org>
and subject line Re: Bug#1076617: installation-guide: Severely outdated information wrt partitioning
has caused the Debian Bug report #1076617,
regarding installation-guide: Severely outdated information wrt partitioning
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

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-- 
1076617: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1076617
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message ---
Source: installation-guide
Version: 20230623
Severity: normal

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Hash: SHA256

In bug #1076582 it was pointed out that the documentation at
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apcs05.en.html

has the following line:
"create a small (25–50MB should suffice) partition at the beginning
of the disk to be used as the boot partition"

Earlier in that bug and also in #1076539 (which likely is the same
issue) I made the argument that 512MB (the current d-i default) for the
``/boot`` partition is already problematic.

https://bugs.debian.org/960181#15 contains the following line:

> There may be a bug here, in that the /boot partition was too small.
> That has been fixed in the installer, but unfortunately we don't have
> a general way to grow the partition on installed systems.

And there have been other reports that the kernel is getting too big.

Plymouth is installed by default and that includes the GPU modules and
the firmware for it. And the firmware files have been getting bigger
too, especially for nvidia where they just added firmware files which
are respectively 23MB and 38MB in size ... (sigh)

So the recommendation of a 25-50MB ``/boot`` partition is BAD.
REALLY BAD as "we don't have a general way to grow the partition
on installed systems."

But then I read a bit further on the above referenced page and found the
following:

- - "If you have a large IDE disk"
- - "This restriction doesn't apply if you have a BIOS newer than around 1995–98"
- - Seeing the word "cylinder" all over the place ...
- - "CHS translation mode (“Large”)" = Cylinder/Head/Sector I presume?

At that point I fell off my chair :-O

Or as I phrased it in https://bugs.debian.org/1076582#27 :
"Maybe that document should be updated for this CENTURY?"

I actually think this bug should be RC, but couldn't (quickly) find
which (if any) Policy rules it violated.
And 'critical' is possibly a bit much?

But I think these recommendations ought to be updated before Trixie is
released and possibly current Stable docs updated in case someone
follows the Installation Guide recommendation (which is normally and
otherwise a good thing).

For ``/boot`` size it should minimally follow d-i's default, but I
actually think both should be updated to 1G in size, which should
(generally) not be a problem with current TBs NVMe drives.

Cheers,
  Diederik

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (101, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.9.9-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

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--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Version: 20250418

On Thu Jul 25, 2024 at 8:50 PM CEST, Holger Wansing wrote:
> Diederik de Haas <didi.debian@cknow.org> wrote (Tue, 23 Jul 2024 22:14:46 +0200):
>> > > >Or as I phrased it in https://bugs.debian.org/1076582#27 :
>> > > >"Maybe that document should be updated for this CENTURY?"
>> > 
>> > I have prepared a patch, to update the installation-guide (attached),
>> > mostly a removal of outdated / no longer needed information.
>> 
>> Much better!
>> 
>> It may be possible to improve/extend the information further, but that could 
>> happen another time (too).
>> The real problematic parts are gone now, so thanks for that :-)
>
> Just pushed to git.

With the release of version 20250418, this bug is resolved. Thanks!

Cheers,
  Diederik

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