Re: Good fdisk Practices

[Cameron Hutchison <lists@xdna.net>]

David Brodbeck <brodbd@u.washington.edu> wrote:

>I'd always heard that swap files are slower than swap partitions.  Is  
>that a myth?

Not a myth, just old information. It used to be the case that swap files
were slower than swap partitions, but this stopped being true sometime
around kernel 2.4

>Also, is there any good reason to have a separate /boot on a modern  
>system?  I always thought /boot was just a kludge to get around old  
>BIOSes that couldn't load anything that wasn't on the first part of  
>the disk.  I tend to just combine /boot and / on my newer systems --  
>am I taking some kind of risk by doing so?

I do the same and have had no problems. This may restrict the type of
filesystem you can use on your root partition though. I dont think GRUB
can load a kernel from an XFS filesystem, so by separating root and
/boot, you can put ext2/3 on /boot and something else on root.