On 01/22/2015 02:36 PM, Adam Williamson 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.
There are a few references to using shared /boot on Google, but not
that many, and mostly for crazy multiboot configurations that we
really don't want to be stuck dealing with. Does anyone know of a
really sensible use case for this?
For the record, this is actually re-hooking up code that was used in
oldUI - that is, F17 and earlier - but in oldUI it just produced a
warning you had to click through; the current patch flat disallows it.
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.
One specific case does come to mind. Some unfortunate users will have
MBR drives stuck in a partition layout where creation of new partitions
is a limited thing, maybe they don't have an extended partition, and
it's somehow too late to change it - or anaconda can't handle creating
the new partition, anecdotal report here only - and they want to boot
another linux-based OS too. Oh, and they're really attached to the idea
of /boot outside of /, or they're attached to the idea of a separate
/home, so they want to use the one possible new partition as a PV and
reuse the existing /boot.
I have a suspicion that disallowing reuse of /boot is going to hit a lot
of people who are finally getting the gumption to move away from XP on
their old systems and are shopping around for a distro to replace it.
It's an edge case, sure, and likely a self-inflicted one, but there's
probably a whole lot of impoverished schools or users that are just
stuck there for whatever reason, and I'd hate to see Fedora burn them or
turn them away.
--
-- Pete