/boot like linux!

[Bob Johnson]

On Thursday 03 March 2005 07:45 pm, Bob Johnson wrote:
> 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.
>

Nope, for some reason I didn't set that up last time I installed something 
(5.3) on it, but I can almost guarantee that I have done so in the past. Now 
I've turned on softupdates on the root partition and so far (about an hour) 
it's been happy.  For what that's worth.

Maybe I'll turn off the power while the system is active just to see what 
happens (actually, I'm still fascinated by the background fsck that 5.3 
runs).

- Bob