Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 43152
Automatic partitioning creates wastefully large /boot on big HDs
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.5 i686; Nav) Description of problem: I have a 40 GB hard-disk. The automatic partitioning created a 50 MB /boot partition. 15 MB were more than enough for me at all times, ever since I use Red Hat, and having 3 or 4 alternative kernels on it left more than half of those 15 MB unused. It's not that I'll die because of the wasted 35 MB, but it's pointless to have such a big /boot. Wasting resources like that is the Windows way, not linux'. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Choose automatic partitioning. Actual Results: Too large /boot (probably creates it using a disk percentage formula) Expected Results: 15 MB fixed size for all hard-disks Additional info:
I think it's better to err on the side of having too much room than too little. Maybe 15MB is enough for you, but you can't really take that and then say that should apply to everybody. If the user runs out of space and really needs it one day, then they are kind of stuck. Also, there are other things to consider. Some people install GRUB and use that as the bootloader. Grub installs itself into the /boot/grub directory, so that takes up space. Also, on other architectures, kernels take up more space than on x86. For example, on Itanium systems, the kernels are over twice as big as on x86, plus the configuration files for the elilo boot loader is stored in the /boot directory too. We don't want to conditionalize the installer to change it's size for the /boot partition based on architecture. You can always create the partitions manually if 50MB is too big for you. It's too big for me, personally, so I make my /boot 25MB.