Thanks for the responses all. I'm on Gentoo as well for what that matters. I think what i'm going to do (if i don't abandon EFI entirely) is just to get a small (16gb), $25 m.2 since my board supports that, and use that as my boot drive. Then mkfs other all discs to be partitionless and away i go.
Not sure what i'll use the extra 15g on that m.2 for. I learned a lot from your long response Chris. Thank you. On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 8:19 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote: > Chris Murphy posted on Sat, 20 Aug 2016 18:36:21 -0600 as excerpted: > >> FAT leaves a lot to be desired but it's pretty universally supported and >> almost trivial to repair *if* the volume is repairable in the first >> place. The much bigger issue with ESP on Linux is this neurotic tendency >> of distros to persistently mount shit that does not need to be mounted. >> Like the ESP, and even the dedicated boot volume. They only need to be >> mounted when being updated and then should be umounted. And worse the >> convention is to do nested mount with /boot and then /boot/efi for the >> ESP so it's twice as bad a practice. By virtue of mounting the ESP the >> dirty bit is set, so any crash means it must be fsck'd and if that >> doesn't work, it's game over for that volume. Fragile setup. > > Depends on the distro. On gentoo, you set it up the way you want of > course, but the recommendation has always been /boot, and now the ESP, > not mounted by default. > > But that would be /expected/ on gentoo, since being able to configure it > the way you want is the whole /point/ of running gentoo in the first > place. Sort of like arch, only much more so. > > Meanwhile, I'm kinda partial to booting in legacy mode in grub2, with > grub2 installed to the legacy-BIOS partion on multiple gpt-partitioned > devices, which each one having its own /boot as well, setup so the > firmware boot device selector can choose which device and thus which > grub2 installation on that device, I boot from. That gives me as many > backup grub2 installations on the legacy BIOS partitions, pointing at as > many backup /boots on the same device by default, as I care to setup. Of > course what's extra nice about that is that you can switch to the /boot > on another device direct from the grub2 prompt, emergency mode if it > can't load the /boot off that device, if you like. > > -- > Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. > "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- > and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in > the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- Bearcat M. Şándor Feline Soul Systems LLC Voice: 872.CAT.SOUL (872.228.7685) Fax: 406.235.7070 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html