Is it mandatory that /boot is a separate partition in Fedora 30?

After upgrades, one machine did not want to boot, not finding the kernel or initrd. After some investigation, I figured out the newly written BLS entry in /boot/loader/entries/bc6e8f186e8afde79d2ddb0047756edd-5.0.13-300.fc30.x86_64.conf said

linux /606ba17eef1ffa5a76fdb50047756efd/5.0.13-300.fc30.x86_64/linux
initrd /606ba17eef1ffa5a76fdb50047756efd/5.0.13-300.fc30.x86_64/initrd

On this particular machine, /boot is not a separate partition but a directory in the root partition. I’m aware there are efforts to make /boot sharable between distributions, and for that to work it will have to be a partition of its own. But is this a requirement in F30? It was not necessary up to F29. Looking in /usr/lib/kernel/install.d/90-loaderentry.install I see no way to add a /boot to the beginning of the linux and initrd lines.

Am I missing something obvious?

(This particular machine is only running Fedora, and will not have any need for multiboot feature.)

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As there wasn’t any reply, in particular no claim this is intentional, I’m assuming it is a bug and filed bug 1731557.

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Hello @goeran,

Sorry I didn’t see this earlier or I would have replied to you. As far as I know, though not mandatory, it is strongly recommended to have /boot as a separate partition from / and /swap (of course). I know that Grub2 looks for a /boot partition and on some systems (SCSI maybe) it will fail to properly complete the staged startup. The adoption of the BLS further necessitates this since doing so is part of that path. See the wiki on BLS here to further explain this concept and how this relates to Linux distro’s and in this case filesystem formats such as FAT/VFAT/EXT4 etc… In particular, the expected filesystem of the $BOOT partition from BLS POV is VFAT(16 or 32 bit).

Thanks for the reply!

There are good points in standardizing to simplify multi-boot situations. (Even if I can have some doubts about making the common single-boot case more complicated.) I can understand a separate /boot is the recommendation on new installations. But that wasn’t really my point.

My point was if it really was intended to allow existing systems to break on upgrades. If for example the non-separated boot I have was a violation of some rule all the time and just had happened to work. From your post I don’t get the impression you think that is the case, so I guess my bug report still makes sense.

You are welcome,
And the /boot partition is mandatory if you are following the BLS strictly, which Fedora is, or at least that is my understanding. However, this period can rightfully be seen as a transition phase, so how strict is strict? In any case, what you have described as your issue does seem like a bug to me.