[xubuntu-users] "Not enough space on disk /boot"

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 25 May 2015 04:35:12 -0400, Dave Dodge wrote:
>Every time I install a new system I now make sure to do custom
>paritioning and bump /boot up to a gigabyte or two simply so I don't
>have to manually clean it up as often.

All my Linux are installed on one partition only. This partition even
includes /home. So directories such as /boot can't suffer from to less
space. I just use separated partitions on separated devices for
real-time audio data and similar things, so access is faster and I can
share it with my Debian, Ubuntu and Arch installs. Several directories
are tmpfs. If /tmp is tmpfs too, it could become an issue, when
compiling inside /tmp, that easily can be solved by an /etc/fstab
entry, using the "size=" option, to make /tmp larger than just half of
the available memory or by building outside of /tmp, e.g. in /usr/src.
There absolutely isn't the need to use more than one partition excepted
of data access performance, this data might be in /home or in other
directories. Some people might prefer a separated partition for /home,
regarding their work flows when restoring from backups or installing a
new release of a distro, but in my experiences restoring /home from a
backup isn't much work. If software should fill up home, a separated
partition won't help much and restoring data that is corrupted or
deleted always is an issue with or without a separated partition. Having
e.g. /boot on a separated partition makes absolutely no sense, resp.
there might be a few exceptions.

"The reason for putting /boot on a partition separate from the regular
root file system is that you can reduce on-disk file system complexity,
which reduces the demands on the boot loader to bootstrap the kernel
and initial RAM disk. This becomes particularly interesting if you are
running a non-trivial setup - maybe you are running RAID, or an unusual
file system such as ZFS on the root partition, or an encrypted root
partition." -
http://superuser.com/questions/522971/is-a-boot-partition-always-necessary

The author mentions swap, indeed, I also use separated partitions for
swap.

Regards,
Ralf