Why is it said that if you are using grub as the boot loader, make the file system that holds the /boot partition an ext2 filesystem ?

syg00

Was more of an issue in the past. The boot partition doesn't get updated very often, so it was thought there was no need for a journal on the f/s. Hence ext2 rather than ext3 - also saves a little space.These days with large cheap disks, just allocate a decent amount of space (say 50-100 Meg), and don't worry about it; use ext3 if you prefer.


Herman

If you are installing in a very small hard disk there is a small savings in hard disk space to be gained by only using ext2 instead of ext3.Remember, it wasn't all that long ago when an 8 GB hard disk was considered very large. The original hard disk in my old 'Book PC was 6 GB and I dual booted Windows 98 and Ubuntu Warty Warthog in 3.0 GB each. Now we are used to 80 GB or 160 GB hard disks and even 500 GB hard disks and larger are available!

By modern standards, with the huge hard disks most people have now, the saving is not noticeable at all. I think that claim is out of date unless you are installing in a USB flash memory or something like that and every bit of disk space counts. (Just my personal opinion), but then you would be better off to use reiserfs anyway. There is a 6% space savings with reiserfs compared with ext2 and it is around eight to fifteen times faster than ext2 when handling files smaller than one k in size. Even flash memories these days are getting quite large.