You might or might not know that for a while now I’ve passed most of my time idling and chatting in #gentoo-it, trying to offer support whenever I can (when the user asking support deserves it at least). One of the strangely quite common type of support request involved to some extent the standalone /boot partition.
But why people insist on using a standalone /boot partition?
The /boot partition, where you add not only the grub configuration (with its stages), but also the kernels (you might, and probably should, have multiple copies), with their System.map, and optionally their configuration files, the eventual splashscreen for grub and some other stuff, was classically used to allow grub to access the kernel even on systems with a BIOS unable to allow access over the 1024 sector of an hard drive (grub can’t obviously have drivers for all the controllers, so it only uses the BIOS to access the disk). As a partition that would cross that boundary wouldn’t be properly readable by the BIOS, and thus by grub, the common solution was to put a small /boot before that boundary, and then leave the root partition to cross it, as once the kernel booted, the limitation could be ignored safely.
There are of course other cases where a standalone /boot partition could be useful, one case can be to have a way for grub to start and load the kernel, which in turn can boot with a rootfs stored on a device that the BIOS wouldn’t have been able to see (like a software raid1 or a PCI controller that couldn’t be detected); this is my reason to use a /boot on a CF memory card for Klothos: OpenBOOT doesn’t recognize the Promise SATA controller (I just have a SATA disk for that box), and thus I need to boot the kernel from an EIDE-compatible storage (in this case, the CF through an adapter). Please note that Klothos runs FreeBSD; more on that later.
Other cases where having /boot standalone can help is for half-thin clients where the kernel is stored locally, and then the rootfs is mounted via NFS: you can use a simple storage, like the CF I use, to keep /boot, and then load the rest, if the network card doesn’t support proper network boot.
But for the average user, does /boot provide any advantage? Maybe the only one is to avoid the user from deleting the kernel with rm -rf / but that’s almost useless: you would have screwed your system anyway at that point. I find it actually has a big disadvantage: if the user forgets to put it in fstab, he’d have to always mount it before running a make install for the kernel, and that’s something easily forgot.
Also, the use of a different partition for /boot confuses the hell out of some users, who don’t really understand the difference between Linux’s root filesystem’s partition and grub’s root. When I get a support request about installing grub, and I understand the user is confusing the root= parameter to the kernel and the (root hdX,Y) parameter for grub, my suggestion is to just get rid of the standalone /boot.
Not only this, it’s also difficult to decide the size for such a partition: a lot of people would use a size too small, or too big and then waste space.
Now about FreeBSD, well, it also uses a /boot directory, although it contains not only the kernel but also all its modules, and it makes it way harder to move it on a standalone partition. The FreeBSD documentation doesn’t really cover that option, and even looking around you’ll see a lot of people telling you it can’t be done, that FreeBSD ain’t Linux and that /boot is not something to move to its own partition. The truth is that sometimes you just need to do it, and you can, it’s just something much harder to do than in Linux. I had my own trouble, but then solved it.
So, while I can’t say I like FreeBSD idea of hiding the information that shouldn’t be used by the average user, I think that they are cutting out a lot of possible problems this way, and I think that Linux documentation should actively discourage average users of modern system from using a standalone /boot partition.
So my suggestion is: if you can’t name the reason why you’re using /boot as a standalone partition, then don’t use it.