3 ms·

I remember even into the early 2010s we would still just make for example /boot ext2 for simplicity sake (perhaps?). Is that still in practice? Haven’t been in

I remember even into the early 2010s we would still just make for example /boot ext2 for simplicity sake (perhaps?). Is that still in practice? Haven’t been in the OS deployment weeds for a minute..

sargun 3y ago
And to avoid wasting space on the journal. Also, iirc bootloaders didn’t have full ext3 support yet.
Latty 3y ago
People tend to use FAT these days because it tends to be an EFI system partition and almost all modern systems are UEFI.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  And eons ago, people made fun of me for using MS-DOS and loadlin as a bootloader for Linux. (This always worked fine for me, and MS-DOS was simple to make boot and install tools on with hardware of the time. A functional-enough MS-DOS installation took up a trivial amount of space on a garden-variety PC of the day, and it was easy to pare down.) Fast forward 20 or 30 years: We're back to using a FAT[32] partition for booting, just with a very different mini-OS to do the job. le sigh.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    I dunno that it’s really all that different. EFI is sort of what DOS would likely have become if MS had kept with it. It uses PE format, has back slash paths, has the same .3 extensions, and so on. There are certainly many similarities.
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      What's different is that using loadlin on MS-DOS was "lol, fuckin' newb" material (even though it was exquisitely functional and ridiculously easy to use), while the potentially very similar EFI system is a heralded as a champion. I guess I am trying to express my annoyance with the Linux crowd's fickle nature over the years.
      - Latty 3y ago
        I'm not sure that's on the Linux crowd: UEFI is what the hardware ships with, they don't really have much of a choice.
        ssl-3 3y ago
        My own (perhaps old) hardware gives me a choice of old-school BIOS, or more-modern UEFI. (But perhaps amusingly-counter to my original suggestion, old-ass archaic emulated BIOS seems to still be preferred in some spaces in the VM-using crowd -- at least where things like libvirt are involved. In those spaces, BIOS usually works fine and it generally boots faster than *EFI.)
LeoPanthera 3y ago
I use ext4 (for /boot) but I always enable "sync". I always imagine that makes it less likely to suffer corruption but I have no actual evidence for that. I might be making it up.
perihelions 3y ago
It's the default for Debian, - "The default file system selected in most cases is ext4; for /boot partitions ext2 will be selected by default when guided partitioning is used." https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch06s03.en.html#di-partition https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch06s03.en.ht... ("Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide (Bookworm/amd64)")

I remember even into the early 2010s we would still just make for example /boot ext2 for simplicity sake (perhaps?). Is that still in practice? Haven’t been in the OS deployment weeds for a minute..

sargun 3y ago

And to avoid wasting space on the journal. Also, iirc bootloaders didn’t have full ext3 support yet.

Latty 3y ago

People tend to use FAT these days because it tends to be an EFI system partition and almost all modern systems are UEFI.

ssl-3 3y ago
And eons ago, people made fun of me for using MS-DOS and loadlin as a bootloader for Linux. (This always worked fine for me, and MS-DOS was simple to make boot and install tools on with hardware of the time. A functional-enough MS-DOS installation took up a trivial amount of space on a garden-variety PC of the day, and it was easy to pare down.) Fast forward 20 or 30 years: We're back to using a FAT[32] partition for booting, just with a very different mini-OS to do the job. le sigh.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  I dunno that it’s really all that different. EFI is sort of what DOS would likely have become if MS had kept with it. It uses PE format, has back slash paths, has the same .3 extensions, and so on. There are certainly many similarities.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    What's different is that using loadlin on MS-DOS was "lol, fuckin' newb" material (even though it was exquisitely functional and ridiculously easy to use), while the potentially very similar EFI system is a heralded as a champion. I guess I am trying to express my annoyance with the Linux crowd's fickle nature over the years.
    - Latty 3y ago
      I'm not sure that's on the Linux crowd: UEFI is what the hardware ships with, they don't really have much of a choice.
      - ssl-3 3y ago
        My own (perhaps old) hardware gives me a choice of old-school BIOS, or more-modern UEFI. (But perhaps amusingly-counter to my original suggestion, old-ass archaic emulated BIOS seems to still be preferred in some spaces in the VM-using crowd -- at least where things like libvirt are involved. In those spaces, BIOS usually works fine and it generally boots faster than *EFI.)

LeoPanthera 3y ago

I use ext4 (for /boot) but I always enable "sync". I always imagine that makes it less likely to suffer corruption but I have no actual evidence for that. I might be making it up.

perihelions 3y ago

It's the default for Debian, - "The default file system selected in most cases is ext4; for /boot partitions ext2 will be selected by default when guided partitioning is used." https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch06s03.en.html#di-partition https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch06s03.en.ht... ("Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide (Bookworm/amd64)")