Hello,

I would say we simply increase the size of the partition to 512 MiB. It feels a little bit wasteful, but there is not much else we can do if we want to continue supporting XFS.

I do not think there is any benefit in mixing partition types, because with XFS selected and VFAT being used for EFI and ext4 being used for /boot you would have a whole zoo of file systems not offering any advantage.

I have no idea what the state is out there that we can finally drop the /boot partition and systems with hard drives of several terabyte size would still be able to boot. So for that reason, I would like to keep things as they are and just enlarge the partition.

Best,
-Michael

> On 5 Apr 2023, at 10:16, Stefan Schantl <stefan.schantl(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello Arne,
> 
> thanks for having a look on this and figuring out this limitation.
>> At my tests about the grub install bug i found another that is there
>> since core173.
>> 
>> The install on xfs filesystem fails because xfsprogs refuse to create
>> filesystems smaller than 300MB.
>> 
>> https://bugzilla.ipfire.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13077
>> 
>> there are three possible solutions:
>> 1. add "-unsupported" flag to ignore this limit (not sure if this a
>> good 
>> idea
>>     because we had strange out of space reports in the past also if
>> no 
>> additional filles
>>     are installed.)
> 
> The will have their reasons, why the developers choosed 300 MB as
> minimum file system size. Even there is this flag to bypass that, may
> there as you already mentioned unexpected side effects.
> 
>> 
>> 2. enlarge boot partition
> 
> This would be a good idea, because the kernel size grows up from
> release to release and if there are strange out of space problems in
> the past would solve them too. Enlarge to for example 512MB would solve
> both issues at once.
> 
> Are there any problems to expect for small installations on very
> limited storage space (SD-cards etc.) ?
> 
>> 
>> 3. switch boot partition to ext4
> 
> This would bypass the XFS limitation but would result in a kind of
> very fragmented filesystem types. EFI would be vfat, boot ext4 and if
> selected the main file systemd XFS.
> 
> I would no expect any troubles when doing this but for me it tastes a
> bit dizzy and unclean.
> 
>> 
>> Which is the best solution?
> 
> In theory there would be a fourth option:
> 
> 4. Drop the option to select XFS during setup and force the usage of
> ext4....
> 
>> 
>> Arne
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> -Stefan