Re: ext2 for /boot ???
On Fri 14 Sep 2018 at 00:31:16 (-0400), Kenneth Parker wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 5:36 AM Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> 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.
>
>
> This is ABSOLUTELY not supported, because VFAT doesn't give the Permissions
> and File Ownership needed for the Linux Kernel, and supporting files.
This is a partial listing of my ESP which is used for booting
Windows10, and of /boot (which is part of / here). Could you elaborate
on which permission/ownership information is missing in either.
$ ls -laF /media/swan02/ /media/swan02/*/
/media/swan02/:
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 31 1969 ./
drwxr-xr-x 94 root root 4096 Sep 13 16:24 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 27 2013 BOOT/
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Aug 8 2015 BOOTSECT.BAK*
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 27 2013 EFI/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 17 2016 System Volume Information/
/media/swan02/BOOT/:
total 3104
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 27 2013 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 31 1969 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3170304 Jun 2 2012 boot.sdi*
/media/swan02/EFI/:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 27 2013 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 31 1969 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 27 2013 Boot/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 27 2013 Microsoft/
/media/swan02/System Volume Information/:
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 17 2016 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 31 1969 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76 Nov 17 2016 IndexerVolumeGuid*
$ ls -laF /boot/
total 24696
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 14 10:07 ./
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Aug 20 23:00 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 186568 Aug 13 14:31 config-4.9.0-7-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 186589 Aug 21 09:50 config-4.9.0-8-amd64
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Aug 24 16:32 grub/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5015105 Aug 18 08:27 initrd.img-4.9.0-7-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5015414 Aug 23 06:58 initrd.img-4.9.0-8-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3192069 Aug 13 14:31 System.map-4.9.0-7-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3193845 Aug 21 09:50 System.map-4.9.0-8-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4232992 Aug 13 14:31 vmlinuz-4.9.0-7-amd64
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4237088 Aug 21 09:50 vmlinuz-4.9.0-8-amd64
$
> Also, you might be using an existing EFI Partition, courtesy of Microsoft.
> (For example, I have a Lenovo, that came with Windows 10 Installed,
Same here, except that it was bought in 2013-11 and upgraded to W10.
AIUI the ESP is designed to be shared between OSes for the storage
of their boot loaders, kernels and device drivers. That would include
all the files above.
> which
> I Completely Replaced with Xubuntu 16.04 [planned to be replaced with
> Debian Stretch in the next Month]. The only Windows now is under
> Virtualbox, and hasn't been booted in Months! BUT: EFI is the original
> vfat Partition that came with the Laptop).
… whereas I installed Debian as if this was the sole OS by using the
BIOS booting method rather than EFI. W10 knows to ignore the linux
installation; Debian mounts the W10 partitions readonly. Interfering
with W10 (beyond using its defrag/optimise filesystem and shrink
partition operations) was not an option.
> /boot is ext2, because I was
> never "told" to make it anything else!
As I was already carving five partitions out of the main MS Data
partition (two root filesystems, swap, /home and BIOS boot), there
seemed little point in adding yet another for no particular
benefit. There are now 14 partitions in total (GPT), plus 1MB of
free space at each end.
Cheers,
David.
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