Re: [gentoo-user] UEFI kernel installation?

[Wols Lists]

On 16/06/19 18:00, Grant Taylor wrote:
> I don't know if it's better or not, but here's what I'd do.
>
>  · I'd put each OS on it's own drive (if at all possible).
>  · I'd have a separate /boot and / (root) for each OS.
>  · I'd configure UEFI boot menu entries for each OS.
>
> That way, the only thing that's common between the OSs is the hardware
> and the UEFI.  They are separate from the time that UEFI boot menu onward.
>
I'd have a single /home partition, just be aware that this can cause
problems if your different OS's have different levels of eg KDE as they
can fight each other ...

> I recommend the separate drives so that you can use the OS on the other
> drive to deal with a drive hardware issue.
>
> I /might/ be compelled to try to leverage the two drives for some swap
> optimization.  I'd probably have a minimal amount of swap on the same
> drive as the OS and more swap on the other drive.  That way each OS has
> some swap in the event that the other drive fails, yet still has more
> swap if the other drive is happy.  So you benefit from the 2nd drive
> without being completely dependent on it.

Drives are cheap. The old "swap is twice ram" rule actually isn't an old
wife's tale - the basic Unix swap mechanism NEEDS twice ram. Okay,
optimisations turned "must" into "should", and the swap mechanism was
seriously revamped many moons ago and may have changed things completely
(I've never managed to get anyone knowledgeable to tell me what
happened), but what I do is always ...

Multiply my mobo's *maximum* ram by two. For *each* disk, create a swap
partition that size. Add all swap partitions in with equal priority.

It has been pointed out that this is not necessarily a good idea, a fork
bomb would cause havoc because the machine would grind to a swap halt
long before the OOM killer realised anything was wrong, for example, but
it suits me especially as I put /tmp and /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs.

Cheers,
Wol