Source: installation-guide Version: 20230623 Severity: normal -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
In bug #1076582 it was pointed out that the documentation at https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apcs05.en.html has the following line: "create a small (25–50MB should suffice) partition at the beginning of the disk to be used as the boot partition" Earlier in that bug and also in #1076539 (which likely is the same issue) I made the argument that 512MB (the current d-i default) for the ``/boot`` partition is already problematic. https://bugs.debian.org/960181#15 contains the following line: > There may be a bug here, in that the /boot partition was too small. > That has been fixed in the installer, but unfortunately we don't have > a general way to grow the partition on installed systems. And there have been other reports that the kernel is getting too big. Plymouth is installed by default and that includes the GPU modules and the firmware for it. And the firmware files have been getting bigger too, especially for nvidia where they just added firmware files which are respectively 23MB and 38MB in size ... (sigh) So the recommendation of a 25-50MB ``/boot`` partition is BAD. REALLY BAD as "we don't have a general way to grow the partition on installed systems." But then I read a bit further on the above referenced page and found the following: - - "If you have a large IDE disk" - - "This restriction doesn't apply if you have a BIOS newer than around 1995–98" - - Seeing the word "cylinder" all over the place ... - - "CHS translation mode (“Large”)" = Cylinder/Head/Sector I presume? At that point I fell off my chair :-O Or as I phrased it in https://bugs.debian.org/1076582#27 : "Maybe that document should be updated for this CENTURY?" I actually think this bug should be RC, but couldn't (quickly) find which (if any) Policy rules it violated. And 'critical' is possibly a bit much? But I think these recommendations ought to be updated before Trixie is released and possibly current Stable docs updated in case someone follows the Installation Guide recommendation (which is normally and otherwise a good thing). For ``/boot`` size it should minimally follow d-i's default, but I actually think both should be updated to 1G in size, which should (generally) not be a problem with current TBs NVMe drives. Cheers, Diederik - -- System Information: Debian Release: trixie/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (101, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 6.9.9-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iHUEARYIAB0WIQT1sUPBYsyGmi4usy/XblvOeH7bbgUCZpq2WQAKCRDXblvOeH7b bkzhAQCWg9McvuTHGa23GOMygGw1kBk7ubr+U1aawm5e1vtmHAEAwHSzQBAzAft+ iKW6W2syMOTg4dcAncK5uO7k2QCe1AI= =+qN2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
