Howard Lowndes wrote: > Going slightly OT, but is the /boot partition necessary any longer. > Wasn't that a method of getting around the "boot must be in the first > 1023 cyl" limit?
It's not necessary, since the limit doesn't exist on modern machines. There's no reason for it to be the default in an installer beyond conservatism (which is no bad attitude to hold, as people get annoyed when their box won't boot). It's a very useful option to have as it allows boot limits on other architectures to be overcome too. I do like Linux's use of a partition as opposed to Microsoft's use of immovable 'system' files. It makes backup and restore of a system much simpler. The One True Partitioning scheme is / :-) Seriously, for a single-spindle machine I wouldn't stuff about with partitioning unless you want to encrypt your home directory with dm_crypt. Where partitioning does win is in allowing you to share the I/O load in a deterministic way across multiple spindles. So an Apache server can always have a disk head over the end of /var/log/httpd/access_log; or a transaction database can achieve more consistency of response time by preventing data access from causing index lookups to be queued. But these are Big Iron considerations, and not useful for the average user or server (where installing more RAM for more caching would get more performance than adding spindles). -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
