Preupgrade??

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 04/30/2010 05:31 PM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com
> <mailto:metherid at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 05/01/2010 02:28 AM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
>     > On
>     > ===================
>     >
>     > Isn't it now possible to revert to not using a /boot partition and
>     > having the full / space for installation?
> 
>     No.  Because while the latest GRUB in Fedora supports Ext4, it does not
>     support booting from LVM.
> 
> 
> My /boot partition is 290 MB. Since the default is now 500MB is it
> necessary that I resize? Will /swap be used if necessary? I have 2 GB of

Necessary?  no.  But you may have problems upgrading if you don't have
enough storage in /boot for whichever upgrade method you choose to use
during the upgrade.

Me?  I recently deleted my LVMs and re-partitioned my F13 system with a
single / partitition (ext4) and a swap partition (instead of having a
/boot partition, now /boot is just a subdirectory of /.

Swap?  Non-sequitor.  /boot is file-system (disk) space.  Swap is
virtual memory for RAM.  They are not the same thing.  It is possible to
put swap space in your filesystem, or have a separate swap partition on
your disk (or both, or multiple instances of either or both).

> swap that have, I believe, never been used since I have 4 GB RAM. Maybe
> another formatting would have been preferable...

Swap gets used when your system gets busy enough to run out of RAM.
System memory is transient.  It is used for programs and program data,
for I/O buffer space, and for allocated (heap) storage by your programs.
(Its even possible to create a RAM disk in your system memory.)
Be grateful that your system doesn't seem to need all the swap space you
have set-up.  It will perform better than a system that constantly uses
its swap space (RAM I/O is faster than disk I/O).

Now, if you want to trade off some of your swap partition to add to your
/boot partition, that *may* be do-able if the are adjacent on the disk,
or are both allocated from Logical Volumes in the same Physical Volume.
 If that is not the case, you may have to spend time moving things
around on your disk in order to be able to do that.

Or, with a back-up/restore, you could *swap* them on your disk.  2GB of
/boot space where your swap used to be, and 290MB of swap space since
you don't seem to need it very much.  You can always add more swap space
later if you need it, either through another disk, another swap
partition, or a swap file.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)