/boot like linux!

[Garance A Drosehn]

At 6:24 AM +0100 3/4/05, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>Jesse Guardiani writes:
>
>  > Doesn't the boot partition have to NOT have soft updates
>  > though?
>
>That's your choice.  By default, it won't, since data loss
>is more likely with soft updates (anything that doesn't
>immediately write everything physically to disk creates a
>risk of data loss).  But you can force it if you wish.

Softupdates is generally turned off for '/', because '/' is
expected to be a relatively small partition.  Earlier versions
of softupdates would behave badly if a partition was low on
free disk space, and if you removed a lot of files immediately
followed by creating about the same amount of files.  This is
exactly what happens when you do a 'make installkernel', and
that used to run into problems if '/' was tight on space.

That is not as much of a problem now, but it is still reasonable
to have softupdates be off *if* '/' is a small partition which
doesn't get updated very much.

I have run with softupdates on for '/' on all my systems, for
a few years now.  It has not caused me any problems that I
know of, but then the way I define my partitions is probably a
lot different than what most people do.

If we thought that softupdates made it *significantly* more
likely that users would *lose* data, then we would not turn it
on for any partitions!

>  > I want / + /boot. It's that simple.
>
>Then create them that way.

It happens that this will run into some problems, as has been
described in other messages in this thread.

For what it's worth, I (personally) like the idea of having a
separate /boot partition, but I have many other projects that
are more important to me (personally), so I haven't spent any
time looking into this project yet.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =      gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad at FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA