Does anyone reuse /boot or /var partitions ?

[Chris Murphy]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Adam Williamson
<adamwill at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> There's a proposed anaconda patch ATM which would disallow mounting an
> existing partition as /boot or /var (or any subdirectory of those
> except /var/www ) without reformatting it. i.e., you can't reuse an
> existing partition with those mountpoints.
>
> I'm curious to know if anyone / many people do this, and if so, if
> there's a particularly good use case for it; if so, we might want to
> provide that feedback to the anaconda folks.

The upstream Bootloaderspec calls for a shared /boot on BIOS. And
mjg59's derivative bootloaderspec calls for a shared /boot on both
BIOS and UEFI.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/MatthewGarrett/BootLoaderSpec/


> The main driving force for this is
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1074358 , as it
> keeps turning out to be annoyingly tricky to make sure that only newly-
> installed kernels have their initramfs regenerated when installing to a
> shared /boot partition.

Each distro is to have its own directory on /boot per the
bootloaderspecs (both of them) which would resolve this problem.

If we're serious about stateless systems, and if /var is the right
place to store stateful data that's also portable, then it's plausible
we'd want a prepopulated /var and just restore root and boot in order
to do a system reset. In effect everyone else (Windows, OS X, Android,
iOS) are doing things this way but with the cloud storing such
configuration data and restoring it automatically, I don't know what'd
intended here, maybe it's the realm of Fedora Atomic.

-- 
Chris Murphy