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Date:      Sun, 29 Jan 2017 15:15:19 +1100
From:      Aristedes Maniatis <ari@ish.com.au>
To:        freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Boot partition size
Message-ID:  <a4cab85a-5e79-c7c1-fbb7-d9cf83cbf556@ish.com.au>

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From: Aristedes Maniatis <ari@ish.com.au>
To: freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Message-ID: <a4cab85a-5e79-c7c1-fbb7-d9cf83cbf556@ish.com.au>
Subject: Boot partition size

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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=3D=
diff&rev1=3D16&rev2=3D17


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 do=
esn'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 recomme=
ndations and settings not anticipating future needs quickly enough. But t=
his mess now is completely self-inflicted foot shooting.


1. Why is the recommendation now 128kB and not much much higher? When tha=
t limit is broken in a couple of years, will there be another round of an=
noyed users? Is someone concerned that ZFS users are running hard disks o=
ver 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 shrun=
k, 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 mis=
sing certain features I might not need? eg. a RAIDZ2 version that skips s=
upport 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


--=20
-------------------------->
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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