On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org 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.
The upstream Bootloaderspec calls for a shared /boot on BIOS. And mjg59's derivative bootloaderspec calls for a shared /boot on both BIOS and UEFI.
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/BootLoaderSpec/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/MatthewGarrett/BootLoaderSpec/
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.
Each distro is to have its own directory on /boot per the bootloaderspecs (both of them) which would resolve this problem.
If we're serious about stateless systems, and if /var is the right place to store stateful data that's also portable, then it's plausible we'd want a prepopulated /var and just restore root and boot in order to do a system reset. In effect everyone else (Windows, OS X, Android, iOS) are doing things this way but with the cloud storing such configuration data and restoring it automatically, I don't know what'd intended here, maybe it's the realm of Fedora Atomic.