On 5/28/19 1:23 PM, stan wrote:
On Tue, 28 May 2019 10:26:10 -0600
Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com> wrote:
> One possible gotcha is the boot volume needs to be big enough. For a
> few releases it's been 1GiB which probably is big enough for two
> Fedora's to share, because we don't use kdump by default whereas I
> guess it's configured on RHEL and that was the impetus behind the boot
> volume size change.
Does this larger boot volume have to be at the start of the drive.
Could I re-purpose a swap partition into a boot volume?
The /boot partition can be anywhere. I generally don't even create a
separate partition, it's just included in /. But if you're wanting to
share it, it would need to be separate.
So, couldn't there be a utility, which when the user points it at
an
alternate installation, it creates a link in the boot volume with
priority. The way grub(1) used to do with the configfile entry.
You can still do that. Even with BLS I would expect you could add an
entry in the static part of the grub.cfg to point to the other installation.
> Another gotcha is on UEFI, the older Fedora during software
updates
> will (rarely) need to update the bootloader which will step on the
> binary files in /boot/efi/EFI/fedora, which isn't the end of the world
> but it's probably better if the old Fedora /etc/fstab is modified to
> remove the automount of /boot/efi so that the EFI System partition
> isn't ever updated except by the new Fedora.
For a single large boot directory for all OSs on the system, couldn't
there be a directory for each OS, allowing for both update and a
boot selection screen (a menu of available OSs).
Probably, but you would somehow have to convince each OS install to
update its own part.
> On UEFI the contents of the EFI system partition in EFI/fedora
are
> blown away and replaced. It's been that way since we've had UEFI
> support as far as I can recall. The nice thing is that on Fedora 30
> with BLS support, the grub.cfg on the ESP no longer contains the
> Fedora menu entries, those are now on the boot volume. So they will be
> preserved, but again they're ignored out of the box because we don't
> automatically share boot volumes.
I'm not familiar with the term ESP. From context, some kind of
partition? Is the boot volume you refer to where the Fedora menu
entries are stored /boot? Or a separate partition?
It's the EFI boot partition where the firmware knows to find the boot
loaders. It's not /boot, it's normally mounted at /boot/efi.