On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com> wrote:
You need /boot and / in the same partition to use on of the most useful features of btrfs and snapshots: be able to boot the system as it was before an update that went fubar.
I see no purpose in keeping /boot as part of the RootFS under a BtrFS file system.
Snapshotting becomes immensely more complicated if they are separated because now the kernel is separated from /lib/modules. Not only is it more complicated, but you're limited how far back you can rollback. So to make this work you'd have to tighten up (substantially) the total number of rollbacks to have parity with the available kernels and hence boot menu entries. What can be done is to separate /boot using a subvolume if you want, for some reason but I don't see a major benefit of this.
I do see a great deal of utility in having it as a small (comparatively speaking on a 1T drive for example) as an ext[234] partition. It makes life a LOT simpler when thing go pear shaped and the BtrFS goes into some unrecoverable state.
This is an argument in favor of: - a bootable recovery partition+volume, which is what OS X and Windows have done for a very long time now, which is a totally stateless environment - a read only root fs that is only offline updated to significantly reduce the chances of fs corruption or confusion, and this could still be snapshot.
I *do* understand about snapshots and their use as 'backup'.
But the only cse I cn see where having a /boot where you can't get to a previous version is if you configure /etc/zypp/zypp.conf not to store multiversion, that is to store one and only oncer version of the bootable kernel.
Well if you're advocating a smaller volume for /boot it's very quickly going to run out of room, especially if it's not Btrfs because now there's not even the possibility of block dedup. -- Chris Murphy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org