Re: ext2 for /boot ???
On Wed 12 Sep 2018 at 11:36:22 (+0200), Sven Joachim wrote:
> On 2018-09-12 10:11 +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 11:32:56PM -0400, Lee wrote:
> >>Just out of curiosity - why would journaling be undesirable on a
> >>partition that is almost never written to?
> >
> > …I'm not sure what the answer to your question is, but with regards
> > /boot and filesystems: on one EFI host of mine, I had a lot of problems
> > with /boot/efi precisely because it couldn't be journalled (mandated to
> > be vfat) and I had filesystem issues with it after every unscheduled
> > power failure. I ended up bodging my system to mount it read-only by
> > default, and had to add some apt hooks to remount it writeable for a
> > selection of packages (e.g. new kernel, basically anything that might
> > trigger an initramfs rebuild)
>
> This sounds like you put /boot/efi on the same filesystem as /boot which
> is not recommended or supported at all[1]. On my laptop there is only a
> single file under /boot/efi, namely /boot/efi/EFI/debian/grubx64.efi -
> which will be written to on updates to the grub-efi package, but not
> when installing a new kernel or rebuilding an initramfs.
>
> 1. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=163988
I read through this and couldn't work out its relevance. My boot
partition doesn't contain any hard links: the link counts are all 1.
The problem mentioned in the bug report (hard links are necessary to
conserve space) would be irrelevant as there's so little demand for
space in /boot.
Now I think I can see the temptation to put all of /boot into the ESP:
mine contains a tree of files under grub/ plus the eight kernel files
one would expect—nothing that appears to conflict with a VFAT
filesystem—so the EFI directory would fit nicely there.
Examining the real ESP on this PC, I don't see any potential for name
clashes between the windows files in there and what Debian users
report is in their own ESPs (which appear to be safely stowed under
the directory debian/).
So what are the arguments against doing this (which I accept there may
well be)? We'll ignore the eyebrow-raising need for /boot to be
journalled, shall we?
Cheers,
David.
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