Booting a gazillion linuxes?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu Mar 5 07:59:20 UTC 2009


On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 04:46:38PM -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Mar 2009 21:24:45 +0000
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
> > Is there a reason you want to chainload them (except for Windows of
> > course)?
> 
> I don't care about chainloading so much, but I want them all to
> have independently owned and operated /boot partitions so I don't
> have to fool with manually fiddling with the entries in a shared
> /boot partition after updates and wot-not.
> 
> >From what I'm reading I can't have a /boot partition in an LVM,
> so I can't have enough "real" boot partitions to pair with my
> LVM roots (you can put a lot of roots on a 500GB drive :-).
> 
> I'd be happy to be mistaken about all that though.

You can't have a boot partition on LVM, _but_ you can share a single
boot partition between [certainly Fedora, RHEL and CentOS] guests.
You have to manually aggregate your grub.conf file, and make sure it
is saved somewhere else between each install (because installs
overwrite grub.conf), but other than there is no problem.

In fact, if only there was a "grub.conf.d", you wouldn't even have to
do that ...  An idea for Anaconda perhaps ...

You also have to make sure your /boot partition is large enough, given
that it will be holding 6x its normal number of kernels.  This is how
I have set up several machines, and it works fine.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
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http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/




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