On Fri, 2015-01-23 at 10:07 -0700, Eric Blake wrote:
On 01/22/2015 04:00 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
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.
Couldn't anaconda just be taught to install its new kernel under a just-created /boot/$subdir and leave the rest of /boot untouched?
Sure it *could*, but that's a major change in behaviour that isn't really sensible just to throw in as a bug fix and hope it doesn't break anything else. Also, it's not really anaconda's job, it's the kernel package that decides where its files live.
That sounds to me like both what bootloaderspec variants are proposing - it would get rid of the issue of what do to with any pre- existing kernels, because there are no pre-existing kernels if we always install new kernels under a subdirectory specific to the installation rather than in the top level directory of the partition's filesystem. What good is a proposed shared bootloaderspec document if we aren't willing to implement its ideas, including sharing /boot across multiple distros?
Well, a) so far I don't think anyone else has committed to adopting it so doing it for Fedora wouldn't really achieve a whole lot (except maybe improving multi-Fedora-boot and happening to solve this problem), b) it's a pretty major change and it's all in stuff pjones maintains and he has a lot else to do. mjg59 sent an incomplete implementation to desktop@ (for some reason?) back last July, but that's all I can find:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-July/009995.html
There's also some discussion from 2013 on systemd-devel:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2013-June/011192.html
so basically I think a few people are interested and pushing it along, but it's not top priority for anyone? That's what it looks like. CCing pjones and mjg59 for comment, if they like.