How to clean up full /boot safely?

[Liam Proven]

On 10 February 2018 at 22:26, Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com> wrote:
>
> Indeed, but there actually is no plausible reason for GRUB users to
> seperate /boot from /.

The main reason _used_ to be that the initial part of the boot process
was done in Real Mode, via BIOS calls, and this could not access some
areas of the hard disk (e.g. cylinders above 1024, or anything above
511MB on C/H/S EIDE controllers -- i.e. pre-EIDE, or any area above
8GB (on pre-UltraATA EIDE controllers).

This could affect GRUB.

Now, it is the a different issue.

The kernel can access anything it likes, once the drivers are loaded
-- but the kernel must be on something GRUB can read, i.e. a
straightforward Linux filesystem.

Things GRUB might have problems with:

* filesystems that are not built into the kernel but run as modules (e.g. ZFS)
* filesystems that spread across multiple disks (e.g. ZFS, LVM, software RAID)
* filesystems which are encrypted

I no longer use /boot on any of my machines, it's true -- but I don't
use RAID or encryption or anything.

However my home server badly needs an upgrade to be useful again. It
has 2GB RAM and a Linux software RAID5 of 4 × 300GB disks, formatted
ext4.

The plan is 8GB of RAM and a Zraid of 4 × 2TB disks using ZFS.

It boots off a non-RAID drive, but that kind of thing is why /boot is
still relevant for some.

-- 
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