On 01/22/2015 02:36 PM, Adam Williamson 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.
Yes, I very recently reused the /boot mountpoint when installing a fresh F21 build on top of an earlier F19 install, where I thought it was easier to start fresh than do incremental upgrades. Since my machine is multi-boot, my F19 install had stored grub directly into /dev/sda1 (the /boot partition) rather than the overall drive /dev/sda (that was reserved for my master bootloader that then chainloads the appropriate /boot according to which OS I would be booting). Since newer Fedora installation no longer allows per-partition grub installation for easy chainloading, all I had to do was remount the old /boot, tell anaconda to not install any bootloader, then manually touch up /boot/grub2.cfg to point to the new install's kernel version, without having to futz around with reinstalling grub into the /boot partition.
But I'm in a minority, and I know that chainloading multi-boot installs is already in the fringe. I'm perfectly capable of getting my system to work if /boot is forced to be wiped rather than reused, even if it is more of a hassle on my end.
There are a few references to using shared /boot on Google, but not that many, and mostly for crazy multiboot configurations that we really don't want to be stuck dealing with. Does anyone know of a really sensible use case for this?
I didn't think my situation was that crazy. But you anticipated my use case :)
For the record, this is actually re-hooking up code that was used in oldUI - that is, F17 and earlier - but in oldUI it just produced a warning you had to click through; the current patch flat disallows it. 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.
Ah, a good reason for a forced wipe of /boot.