/boot on a separate partition

[Bob Johnson]

Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 9:30 PM +0100 7/18/05, Ross Kendall Axe wrote:
> >
> >... I want to place the /boot directory in a small 25MB partition
> >at the start of the drive.  Setting up the partition with sysinstall
> >is easy enough, but does anyone have any suggestions of how to
> >diddle the bootloader to accept this configuration?
> 
> I doubt you can on FreeBSD.  The problem is that the OS would have
> to mount both / and /boot before it could do anything, and FreeBSD
> doesn't do that.  It assumes the partition that you are loading
> from is '/', and uses that to find (for instance) /etc/fstab so
> it can find out what the other partitions are.
> 
> I know that linux supports this, as well as some other clever
> trickery with partitions at system-startup, but FreeBSD doesn't.
> 
> >I don't particularly want to go for the standard 'small / partition
> >and separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home...' since I only have
> >a 1GB drive to play with and judging the partition sizes down the
> >nearest KB would be... tricky.
> 
> Create a small-ish / partition, a swap partition, and huge /usr
> partition.  

If you want to play with FreeBSD, that's the way to go.  You can probably get 
away with a 40 MB / partition, 55 MB is almost certainly large enough.  The 
two things in / that grow in normal use are /tmp and /var/log.  Make /tmp 
either a symlink to something on /usr, or mount it as a memory disk (see 
mdconfig(8)).  The default logging doesn't accumulate terribly fast anyway, 
so /var/log isn't very important.  If you handle mail or do 
printing, /var/spool and /var/mail might grow, but usually not enough to be a 
major issue.  The rest of /var probably won't grow enough to matter.

On a 1 GB drive you aren't going to have room to do much learning no matter 
how little you waste in /.  Maybe I should just ship you a bigger hard drive.  
I'm pretty sure I have a 3 or 6 GB drive around that I have no use for.  Are 
you willing to pay shipping?  

> 
> FreeBSD creates a symlink from /home to /usr/home, so
> your home directories are in /usr anyway.
> 

That's true if you don't create an explicit /home partition.  If you 
WANT /home to be a separate partition (makes updating easier/safer), then 
create it, but in this case it probably isn't desirable.


- Bob