/boot filesystem

[J]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 08:43, Ioannis Vranos
<cppdeveloper at ontelecoms.gr> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 18:35 +0800, Goh Lip wrote:
>> On Monday 22,November,2010 11:55 AM, Tom H wrote:
>> > >
>> > >Without any kernel, it will take about only 1 MB. Journaling would
>> > > be a waste of resources.
>> > >
>> > It's not just a question of size. There are very few write operations
>> > on "/boot".
>>
>> Good for clarifying. Of course, one can always use any supported format
>> he/she wishes, though ext2 is more than enough.
>
> /boot partition "without any kernel" doesn't make sense (I am talking
> about a default installation of /boot).

I think he may have meant without "many" kernels, though with the 1MB
limit, i'm not sure...  I could be very wrong there and am just
guessing :-)

> I do not think "very few write operations" is an argument too. And?

Maybe you should explain why "very few write operations" is not a
reasonable argument for not using a journaling FS?  /boot rarely gets
written to.  not wasting overhead on a journal for a partition that
does not see a lot of write actions seems a perfectly good excuse to
me.

> Why isn't ext4 used instead for example?

What answer are you looking for and why?  you've gotten at least one
reasonable answer as to why... but you're asking in the wrong place.
If you really want to know, you need to find and ask the people who
make those decisions at the various distros.  I'd dare say there are
no people, or very very few people on this list who can actually
answer that question with any sort of authority.

If it's theory you want, you've already gotten a good theoretical
answer. You could also consider that A: distros generally do NOT
create a separate /boot by default, B: it wasn't into fairly recently
that ext4 was supported by Grub.  C: going with A: in most cases, you
have to explicitly create your own /boot partition if you want one, so
have at it and make it ext4 if you wish, it's your choice.  You could
make format it in any format supported by grub, if you wished.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but you're asking the same question over
and over while saying that the answer you are getting is not a valid
argument. There are plenty of reasons, but as I said, you'll have to
ask the people who make those decisions for Ubuntu, Fedora, SLES,
RHEL, CentOS, Debian, Slackware, etc as to why they do or do not
create a separate /boot by default, and why they chose to use which
filesystem for it.