You might or might not know that for a while now I’ve passed most of my time idling and chatting in #gentoo-it, trying to offer support whenever I can (when the user asking support deserves it at least). One of the strangely quite common type of support request involved to some extent the standalone /boot partition.
But why people insist on using a standalone /boot partition?
The /boot partition, where you add not only the grub configuration (with its stages), but also the kernels (you might, and probably should, have multiple copies), with their System.map, and optionally their configuration files, the eventual splashscreen for grub and some other stuff, was classically used to allow grub to access the kernel even on systems with a BIOS unable to allow access over the 1024 sector of an hard drive (grub can’t obviously have drivers for all the controllers, so it only uses the BIOS to access the disk). As a partition that would cross that boundary wouldn’t be properly readable by the BIOS, and thus by grub, the common solution was to put a small /boot before that boundary, and then leave the root partition to cross it, as once the kernel booted, the limitation could be ignored safely.
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But why people insist on using a standalone /boot partition?
The /boot partition, where you add not only the grub configuration (with its stages), but also the kernels (you might, and probably should, have multiple copies), with their System.map, and optionally their configuration files, the eventual splashscreen for grub and some other stuff, was classically used to allow grub to access the kernel even on systems with a BIOS unable to allow access over the 1024 sector of an hard drive (grub can’t obviously have drivers for all the controllers, so it only uses the BIOS to access the disk). As a partition that would cross that boundary wouldn’t be properly readable by the BIOS, and thus by grub, the common solution was to put a small /boot before that boundary, and then leave the root partition to cross it, as once the kernel booted, the limitation could be ignored safely.
Discuss
Add this link to...
Tell a friend
Bury
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