Boot partition size

[Aristedes Maniatis]

As recently as last October, the best official advice was to make a 64kB boot partition.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/action/diff/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot/Mirror?action=diff&rev1=16&rev2=17


Now that turns out to be absolutely terrible advice and some people (like me) have dozens of machines that will never be upgradable to FreeBSD 11 or higher. It looks like there is no reasonable method of upgrade that doesn't involve replacing every hard disk on every machine (that's hundred of disks) with larger models. I use a zvol for swap, so I can't make swap smaller to solve the problem.

I started with FreeBSD 4.1 and in 16 years... sigh...

The ashift pain some years ago was also caused by FreeBSD default recommendations and settings not anticipating future needs quickly enough. But this mess now is completely self-inflicted foot shooting.


1. Why is the recommendation now 128kB and not much much higher? When that limit is broken in a couple of years, will there be another round of annoyed users? Is someone concerned that ZFS users are running hard disks over under 500Mb and need to save space? Surely the recommendation should be 512kB?

2. Is there any possible short term future where ZFS volumes can be shrunk, or will I be replacing every hard disk (or rebuilding the machine from scratch)?

3. Is there any possibility of getting a gptzfsboot which is 64kB but missing certain features I might not need? eg. a RAIDZ2 version that skips support for RAIDZ3

4. Will support be added to freebsd-update to warn users BEFORE they try to upgrade and kill their system?



Please cc me, I'm not subscribed.


Ari Maniatis


-- 
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Aristedes Maniatis
CEO, ish
https://www.ish.com.au
GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C  5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A

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