Automatic partitioning is more complicated than just about anyone thinks who hasn't looked into it, and adding partitions increases the complexity, particularly with the hopeless inadequacies of the PC partition table format, and especially if you install more than one version of Linux. In addition, creating a small /boot partition has the obvious problem that the size needs to be chosen extremely carefully lest you end up either running out of space there as you install more kernel versions (noting that we don't yet automatically remove older kernels, and they'll take up more space in /boot over time) or wasting space on small disks that people would rather use for the OS and data. Note that old machines of the sort that are susceptible to this problem are particularly likely to have disks small enough that carving them up into more pieces is liable to create a usability problem later.
Fedora are welcome to the decision they've made here, but I don't want to share the problems they must face as a result. I would rather do just about anything else, and for preference I would very much like to see grub fixed. Either it should just be cleverer about finding its metadata (after all, it's not entirely reliant on the BIOS) or grub-install could even be taught to fail when it detects this situation; if nothing else surely no more of these BIOSes are being made so even a blacklist would be a tolerable approach. Does anyone know if grub2 fixes this problem for good? -- /boot is on root partition by default https://launchpad.net/bugs/88633 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
