Mailing List Archive: /boot

/boot

Oct 29, 2004, 11:05 AM

Post #1 of 3 (223 views)

Why does this dir have a symlink that points to itself? It's just soooo
weird to me.

linux-00 boot # ls -al
total 6586
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 1024 Oct 28 09:25 ./
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4096 Oct 28 07:40 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 25 08:24 .keep
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 752862 Oct 26 08:55 System.map
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 756807 Oct 27 09:28 System.map-2.6.9-fb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 761904 Oct 28 09:25 System.map-2.6.9-raid
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 Oct 25 04:44 boot -> ./
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1442996 Oct 26 08:55 bzImage
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1474486 Oct 27 09:28 bzImage-2.6.9-fb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1499020 Oct 28 09:25 bzImage-2.6.9-raid
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1024 Oct 27 05:38 grub/
drwx------ 2 root root 12288 Oct 25 04:33 lost+found/
linux-00 boot # cd boot/boot/boot/boot/
linux-00 boot # pwd
/boot/boot/boot/boot/boot
linux-00 boot #

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: /boot [ In reply to ]

tradergt at smelser

Oct 29, 2004, 11:10 AM

Post #2 of 3 (224 views)

Permalink

On Friday 29 October 2004 01:05 pm, David Busby wrote:
> Why does this dir have a symlink that points to itself? It's just soooo
> weird to me.

No, its not weird..

You can now reference /boot/kernel-blah.. This way, your boot loader doesnt
care whether /boot is on /, or its own partition.. It will still work.

Jeff

Re: /boot [ In reply to ]

lists at halffull

Oct 29, 2004, 11:12 AM

Post #3 of 3 (217 views)

Permalink

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 11:05:10AM -0700, David Busby wrote:
> Why does this dir have a symlink that points to itself? It's just soooo
> weird to me.

The symlink is there because bootloaders (i.e. grub) can be confusing in their usage, and people sometimes wind up installing into /boot/boot. (If you have a separate /boot partition, and tell grub to use (hd0,0)/boot as might seem natural, you get /boot/boot.)
Rather than have the unfriendly result of failed boots, a simple symlink avoids the issue.
Tom