[Tuxaloosa] Question about /boot

[Robby Workman]

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:25:05 -0500
"Beddingfield, Allen" <allen at ua.edu> wrote:

> Okay...  I recently kicked off a filesystem layout holy war on a 
> SUSE-centered mailing list, so I thought I would get opinions here.


Well, I'm late on this, but...


> I normally create a 500MB /boot as a primary partition, and format it
> as ext3, then use XFS for everything else.
> The source of the holy war on the other forum was my advising someone
> to configure their /boot as above.  It seems that there are a large
> number of people out there who think /boot should only ever be
> ext2....and as many others who think it should always be ext3.
> Opinions?


I think 500MB is bigger than you could possibly need, and I think
either ext2 or ext3 is fine.  I generally use ext2 and keep /boot
mounted readonly until/unless I upgrade a kernel.


> FYI, the normal layout I will do is:
> If partition based
> /boot (500mb) ext3 primary partition
> swap
> / (usually just one large XFS  "/"  for most systems- the source of 
> other holy wars) primary partition
> Depending on the role of the server, I may also do a /srv or /var
> with XFS
> 
> If LVM based:
> /boot (500mb) ext3 primary partition
> volume group name:  vgroup-system
> logical volumes:  lv-swap, vl-system-root
> Sometimes lv-srv or lv-var
> If the /srv or /var are a different disk system, vgroup-srv or 
> vgroup-var, with lv-srv and lv-var


I *hate* xfs.  I can certainly understand why you might need/want it,
but unlinks (file removals) are horrifically slow, and I guess I do
that often enough to notice the delay.  Aside from that, I don't really
have any valid criticisms of xfs.  I used to use jfs on everything, but
these days, ext4 is serving quite well.

-RW