laptop-mode disabled in kernel?

[James Gray]

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O. Sinclair wrote:
> Hi James,
> thanks for the insight and no - I am not able to hack ext3 without
> considerable learning curve. So what I will likely do is to go ext2
> instead since the XP extension actually see ext3 as ext2.

Yep.  ext3 simply adds a journal and a different kernel module so it
actually *uses* the journal.  If not for the kernel module, you could
actually mount an ext3 partition under Linux as ext2 :P  Can't see any
reason why the ext2 driver for Windows would behave any differently.
Just don't get excited in Windows and start deleting the journal :D

> another newbie question (well I used unix in the early 90's, pre
> graphical interface); is there any gain in having a separate boot
> partition contra / and if so, how big should one make it?

These days - not much to be gained.  The old days it was necessary to
have a boot partition before 1024th cylinder on the disk, otherwise the
boot loader couldn't find the kernel (Linux 2.0 with lilo at the time).
 About the same time the 2.2 kernel arrived, the lilo developers
improved their code and the 1024th cylinder barrier disappeared.

The only (modern) benefits, IMHO, in having a separate boot partition are:

1. You can mount it read-only without having to mount your entire "/"
read-only.  This can have security benefits as it prevents anyone
modifying the boot-stuff unless they remount the partition read+write.
Although the circumstances that would lead to this scenario are
certainly a "corner-case".

2. It avoids the problems associated with accidentally filling up the
root partition.  If you decide to keep installing kernels and never
deleting them, you'll chew up a lot of space pretty quickly.  However
most of the kernel's "size" is actually in it's modules, which are in
/lib/modules (which is usually on the root partition) - so there's
precious little to be gained here too.

3. It allows you to use a simple file system (like ext2) for the boot
process which is usually compiled directly into the kernel.  So, if you
have a problem during the boot sequence, you can at least load a basic
"bootstrap" from /boot (assuming you have some static-binary tools in
your initrd).

In short, it's more historical than anything else, although some modern
distro's create one by default (RedHat, I'm looking at you).  If you
want to do things "old school" then /boot should probably be between
30-50MB these days, which will comfortably hold a number of 2.6 kernels,
and a metric butt-load of 2.4 kernels :).

Hope that explains it little

Cheers,

James

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