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What is the recommended size for a linux /boot partition?

And is it safe to not have a /boot partition?

I see some servers don't have a /boot partition while some servers have a 128M /boot partition. I am a little confused. Is /boot partition necessary? If it is, how large should it be?

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4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

These days, 100 Megabytes or 200 Megabytes is the norm.

You do not need to have a /boot partition. However, it's good to have for flexibility reasons (LVM, encryption, BIOS limitations).

Also see: http://superuser.com/questions/66015/installing-ubuntu-do-i-really-need-a-boot-parition

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up vote 12 down vote

What is the recommended size for a linux /boot partition?

The /boot parition contains the GRUB configuration, the kernel with their System.map, ... I think ~ 100MB is enough.

And is it safe to not have a /boot partition?

Yes. But a separate /boot partition has some advantages:

  • as a rescue partition
  • rootfs is on a LVM, RAID, is encrypted, or unsupported by GRUB
  • may be saves a few seconds of boot time
  • ...
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I've been surprised relatively recently with a bios that couldn't access above 1023(?) cylinders, too. – Random832 Nov 25 '11 at 7:54
@quanta how 'may be saves a few seconds of boot time'? – Alessandro Pezzato Nov 25 '11 at 13:28
Because usually /boot is at the beginning of the disk, which is usually on the outer sectors has less chances to get fragmented and the path is smaller (less directory reads), it is usually a primary partition (no need to read the logical partition chain). But I doubt that you gain more than 1s. – Mircea Vutcovici Nov 25 '11 at 15:49
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up vote 5 down vote

I tend to create a 1GB /boot. I leave a livecd image which has various repair tools in my /boot. I mostly do this for systems that at the remote sites I support. With the right configuration, and enough memory, grub2 can boot the image without extracting the contents. A couple times I have talked remote staff into rebooting the system to the livecd image and starting networking/ssh on a system that was having issues so I could connect and repair things.

This certainly isn't required, or even common.

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Which Live CD do you prefer in these cases? – ewwhite Nov 25 '11 at 12:09
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For me the distro of choice is SystemRescueCD and Finnix is another nice one. – Martian Nov 25 '11 at 13:10
You sir, are awesome. – SpacemanSpiff Nov 25 '11 at 13:23
I use PXE for the rescue and provisioning stuff. I can upgrade the rescue stuff much faster and without fear that I can break a running system. – Mircea Vutcovici Nov 25 '11 at 15:53
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up vote 1 down vote

It also differs distribution from distribution. For example for Fedora minimum is 250MB[1] and 500MB is default and if you plan to (pre)upgrade in the future 500MB is required[2]. If space is not a problem I would go for 1GB to prevent shuffling partitions later as I had to do when upgrading recently.

[1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_PreUpgrade#Not_enough_space_in_.2Fboot

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