In a recent comment on my entry on how there's no point in multiplesystem filesystems any more , I was asked:

What about old(er) computers stuck with BIOS booting? Wasn't the wholeseperate /boot/ partially there to appease those systems?

There have been two historical motivations for a separate /boot filesystem in Linux. The lesser motivation is mismatches betweenwhat GRUB understands versus what your system does ;with a separate /boot you can still have a root filesystem thatis, say,

A while back I wrote on how PCs boot and hard disk partitioning , which gave a quick description of theoriginal BIOS MBR -based method ofbooting a PC (in contrast to UEFI booting ).It's worth talking about BIOS booting in slightly more detail so that wecan understand some constraints on it.

In practice, BIOS MBR booting goes through at least two and oftenthree stages. The first stage loader is started by the BIOS whenthe BIOS loads the first 512-byte sector from an

For my sins, I periodically use a number of Javascript-heavywebsites (some of them are sites where the Javascript is core tothe experience). I have similar Javascript enabled environmentsin both Chrome ( in incognito mode ) andFirefox, with relatively similar sets of extensions ( Firefoxversion and Chrome version ). My consistent experience over thepast while is that Chrome is clearly faster on these sites thanFirefox, and in particular Firefox often feels actively laggy.

(Years ago I sort of had the same experience on

Alex Gaynor's Introduction to Certificate Transparency for ServerOperators ( via )is what it says in the title, and taught me some things aboutcertificate transparency in practice. Sadly, one of the things ittaught me is that once again Lighttpd seems to be coming up short as far as modern TLS goes. I reallyshould switch over my personal site to using Apache, even if itwill kind of be a pain because Fedora fumbled good Apacheconfiguration .

(I also hadn't known about Cert Spotter , which

A few days ago I optimistically talked about my plans for a diskshuffle on my office workstation ,by replacing my current 1 TB pair of drives (one of which had failed)with a 1.5 TB pair. Unfortunately when I started putting thingsinto action this morning, one of the 1.5 TB drives failed immediately.We don't have any more spare 1.5 TB drives (at least none that Itrust), but we did have what I believe is a trustworthy 1 TB drive

There are any number of efforts and technologies around these daysthat try to speed up Python, starting with the obvious PyPy and going on to things like Cython and grumpy .Every so often I think about trying to apply one of them to thePython code I deal with, and after doing this a few times (and evenmaking some old experiments with PyPy )I've come to a view of what's important to me in this area.

(This has come to be more and more on my thoughts

In my notes on moving a software RAID-1 root filesystem around , I mentioned that I still had aseparate /boot partition on my home and office machines and Iwanted to merge it into the root filesystem at some point as Ino longer believe in a separate /boot under most circumstances . Having now done this both in a test Fedora25 virtual machine and on my office workstation, it's time to writeup the procedure. For a slight extra complexity, my /boot androot filesystems are

As I mentioned yesterday ,my office workstation lost one of its remaining HDs the other day.This HD is one side of a pair of 1 TB drives that's used for variousmirrored partitions, so I haven't lost anything (unless the otherside also fails before Monday, so let's hope not), but now I needto replace it with one of the ready spares I have sitting aroundfor exactly this eventuality.

The obvious way to replace the failed disk is to do literally that;

My office workstation has been throwing out complaints about someof its disks for some time , which I have been quietlyclearing up rather than replace the disks. This isn't because theseare generally good disks; in fact they're some Seagate 1TB driveswhich we haven't had the best of luck with .I was just some combination of too lazy to tear my office machineapart to replace a drive and too parsimonious with hardware toreplace a disk drive before it failed.

(Working in a place