/boot like linux!

[Bob Johnson]

Jesse Guardiani wrote:

>On Thursday 03 March 2005 5:41 pm, [someone] wrote:
>  
>
>>
>>I'm not sure I understand the problem. If you don't want to create more 
>>partitions, then don't. You can make an 80gb (or 300gb, or whatever) 
>>drive into two partitions - a swap partition (2gig) and a / partition 
>>(78 gig) and install FreeBSD just fine.
>>    
>>
>
>Doesn't the boot partition have to NOT have soft updates though?
>  
>
No, I don't think so.

>I created the setup you described about a year ago with 5.2.1, and
>I had serious problems if the system ever hard rebooted after a
>power failure. Single user manual fsck's and all that.
>
>
>  
>
That configuration should not make serious fs corruption more likely, it 
just
makes it more likely to happen on the / partition (!).  In general, the 
FreeBSD
filesystem is highly tolerant of things like power failures, and should 
be even
better when softupdates is turned on.  But it can fail, and 5.2.1 was NOT
considered a production release, so that could have also played a role in
your problems.  I don't remember if softupdates had problems on 5.2.1 or
not.

>>It's *best* to make more  
>>partitions (esp for /var) so that if something goes out of control 
>>logging, or you just neglect your logs, it doesn't go and fill up your 
>>only (ie / ) partition. Like most *nix OS's, it can be as simple or as 
>>complicated as you want it to be.
>>    
>>
>
>I want / + /boot. It's that simple.
>
>  
>

What are you really trying to accomplish?  You want to run softupdates 
on / ?

I believe it is perfectly acceptable to use softupdates on the root 
partition these
days.  The Handbook recommends turning on softupdates for all filesystems. 
See
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/configtuning-disk.html

I'm pretty sure my test system at home has only / and swap (because it
has a small hard drive), and uses softupdates on /.  I'll check when I get
home.

If you have some other reason for separating /boot from /, explain your 
actual
goal, and perhaps we can help.

- Bob