11–20 of 184 posts
Great to see Lennart back working on what systemd does best: streamlining and cleaning existing grubby (pun intended) parts of Linux. /boot (and ESP) management always feels hacky at best.
Can you explain what about the boot partition status quo seems hacky, and how this approach "cleans" it?
Even Windows has a separate, NTFS boot partition these days. Fail to see the point of this, and since the main take basically is "put your /boot inside the FAT ESP, or if not possible, make /boot a FAT partition", it's also bound to create a lot of disagreement.
Am I missing something?
I format directly the raw unpartitioned SSD/HDD with a file system that uses 100% of the capacity, with no wasted sectors. At least on Linux and FreeBSD, there is no need of partitions.
For booting the computers, I either boot them from Ethernet or I boot them from a small USB memory that uses a FAT file system for storing the OS kernel, either in the format required by UEFI booting, or, when booting Linux in legacy BIOS mode, together with syslinux, which loads the kernel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain what about the boot partition status quo seems hacky, and how this approach "cleans" it?
Issues with the current setup are pretty well laid out in the article.
There are many years since I no longer create partitions on any SSD or HDD, because I believe that this serves no useful purpose and it just wastes a part of the SSD/HDD. I format directly the raw unpartitioned SSD/HDD with a file system that uses 100% of the capacity, with no wasted sectors. At least on Linux and FreeBSD, there is no need of partitions. For booting the computers, I either boot them from Ethernet or…
Even Windows has a separate, NTFS boot partition these days. Fail to see the point of this, and since the main take basically is "put your /boot inside the FAT ESP, or if not possible, make /boot a FAT partition", it's also bound to create a lot of disagreement.
Does it? On my Windows 11 install, the EFI partition is still FAT32. There are no other partitions than the C and the recovery partition. Am I missing something?
There are many years since I no longer create partitions on any SSD or HDD, because I believe that this serves no useful purpose and it just wastes a part of the SSD/HDD. I format directly the raw unpartitioned SSD/HDD with a file system that uses 100% of the capacity, with no wasted sectors. At least on Linux and FreeBSD, there is no need of partitions. For booting the computers, I either boot them from Ethernet or…
You're talking about saving _at most_ 200MBish. That's a lot of work to maintain for little gain...
Even Windows has a separate, NTFS boot partition these days. Fail to see the point of this, and since the main take basically is "put your /boot inside the FAT ESP, or if not possible, make /boot a FAT partition", it's also bound to create a lot of disagreement.
Does it? On my Windows 11 install, the EFI partition is still FAT32. There are no other partitions than the C and the recovery partition. Am I missing something?
There are many years since I no longer create partitions on any SSD or HDD, because I believe that this serves no useful purpose and it just wastes a part of the SSD/HDD. I format directly the raw unpartitioned SSD/HDD with a file system that uses 100% of the capacity, with no wasted sectors. At least on Linux and FreeBSD, there is no need of partitions. For booting the computers, I either boot them from Ethernet or…
I am glad this setup works for you, but many people will not want to need a USB drive to boot their desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, et cetera.
There are many years since I no longer create partitions on any SSD or HDD, because I believe that this serves no useful purpose and it just wastes a part of the SSD/HDD. I format directly the raw unpartitioned SSD/HDD with a file system that uses 100% of the capacity, with no wasted sectors. At least on Linux and FreeBSD, there is no need of partitions. For booting the computers, I either boot them from Ethernet or…
That certainly works, but I'm pretty sure that moving booting off of your main disk is the only reason you can go without partitions, and I'm also pretty sure that most people don't want to deal with that.