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#1 2013-10-29 23:03:45
- nagaseiori
- Member
- Registered: 2012-09-22
- Posts: 72
Dual booting Arch and Gentoo on the same partition
I want to dual boot Arch and Gentoo, but I want them to reside on the same btrfs partition just under different subvolumes. Can I share the same boot partition too? I am planning to have Arch manage GRUB.
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#2 2013-10-29 23:39:23
- WonderWoofy
- Member
- From: Los Gatos, CA
- Registered: 2012-05-19
- Posts: 8,414
Re: Dual booting Arch and Gentoo on the same partition
Why not just keep /boot as part of the subvol for each system? I mean, if you have /gentoo/{bin,boot,dev,etc,home,lib...} and /arch/{bin,boot,dev,etc,...}, then why split off the boot partition at all? Chopping up your filesystem is not necessary unless you have reason to do so. For example, user data is kept in /home. So it makes sense to keep that separate so that you can easily save it when chaging distributions, updating, etc.
In the past /boot was split off so that it could have compatibility with a given bootloader if you used a filesystem for rootfs that wasn't. Also, when using something like LVM2, mdadm, or dm-crypt, you have to have a separate /boot so that the kernel is readable by the bootloader as well. But every bootloader that I can think of these days, except the legacy grub, has btrfs support. And even the grub-legacy can have btrfs support with an existing patch.
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#3 2013-10-30 00:01:30
- nagaseiori
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- Registered: 2012-09-22
- Posts: 72
Re: Dual booting Arch and Gentoo on the same partition
I need to split off the boot partition because of two reasons. GRUB needs extra space for its btrfs module, and I'm using a LUKS container under BTRFS.
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#4 2013-10-30 00:10:10
- WonderWoofy
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- From: Los Gatos, CA
- Registered: 2012-05-19
- Posts: 8,414
Re: Dual booting Arch and Gentoo on the same partition
Okay, that is a pretty good reason.
A /boot can be shared no problem, as long as you take care to have only one distribution handling the bootloader (particularly in the case of grub2), and the kernels don't have exactly the same names.
I think if it were me, I would mount the /boot partition in some arbitrary mountpoint. Then I would make /newboot/{gentoo,arch} and on Arch I would bind mount /newboot/arch to /boot. Then of course, on gentoo, bind mount /newboot/gentoo to /boot. This is not necessary, but it would likely make the OCD part of me happier with things.
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