The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" today signed off on a new feature for Fedora Cloud 44 to switch /boot to being as a Btrfs sub-volume rather than a separate partition.
Fedora Cloud moving forward will drop the separate /boot partition in favor of just using a Btrfs sub-volume for the directory. Though this functionality doesn’t currently work for UEFI-UKI and s390x cloud images so there they will continue using the separate boot partition.
The argument in going for a Btrfs sub-volume as the boot partition is that these images tend to be fixed sizes and grow on deployment thus by eliminating the separate partition they can minimize the initial footprint of each cloud image. In the case of Fed…
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" today signed off on a new feature for Fedora Cloud 44 to switch /boot to being as a Btrfs sub-volume rather than a separate partition.
Fedora Cloud moving forward will drop the separate /boot partition in favor of just using a Btrfs sub-volume for the directory. Though this functionality doesn’t currently work for UEFI-UKI and s390x cloud images so there they will continue using the separate boot partition.
The argument in going for a Btrfs sub-volume as the boot partition is that these images tend to be fixed sizes and grow on deployment thus by eliminating the separate partition they can minimize the initial footprint of each cloud image. In the case of Fedora Cloud and cloud environments in general with not having to worry about bootloader prompts and the like, this can ease the migration to having /boot be a Btrfs subvolume given current GRUB limitations.
This change will affect Fedora 44 next year and again to be completely clear: just cloud deployments outside of IBM s390x and UEFI-UKI configurations. More details on this approved F44 feature via the Fedora Wiki.