On 01/22/2015 02:36 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> There's a proposed anaconda patch ATM which would disallow mounting an
> existing partition as /boot or /var (or any subdirectory of those
> except /var/www ) without reformatting it. i.e., you can't reuse an
> existing partition with those mountpoints.
>
> I'm curious to know if anyone / many people do this, and if so, if
> there's a particularly good use case for it; if so, we might want to
> provide that feedback to the anaconda folks.
>
> There are a few references to using shared /boot on Google, but not
> that many, and mostly for crazy multiboot configurations that we
> really don't want to be stuck dealing with. Does anyone know of a
> really sensible use case for this?
>
> For the record, this is actually re-hooking up code that was used in
> oldUI - that is, F17 and earlier - but in oldUI it just produced a
> warning you had to click through; the current patch flat disallows it.
> The main driving force for this is
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1074358 , as it
> keeps turning out to be annoyingly tricky to make sure that only newly-
> installed kernels have their initramfs regenerated when installing to a
> shared /boot partition.


One specific case does come to mind.  Some unfortunate users will have MBR drives stuck in a partition layout where creation of new partitions is a limited thing, maybe they don't have an extended partition, and it's somehow too late to change it - or anaconda can't handle creating the new partition, anecdotal report here only - and they want to boot another linux-based OS too. Oh, and they're really attached to the idea of /boot outside of /, or they're attached to the idea of a separate /home, so they want to use the one possible new partition as a PV and reuse the existing /boot.

I have a suspicion that disallowing reuse of /boot is going to hit a lot of people who are finally getting the gumption to move away from XP on their old systems and are shopping around for a distro to replace it.  It's an edge case, sure, and likely a self-inflicted one, but there's probably a whole lot of impoverished schools or users that are just stuck there for whatever reason, and I'd hate to see Fedora burn them or turn them away.

--
-- Pete