PDP-8
I’ll check it out. What my dinky cards and slow sticks don’t like are the random writes.
Global News: Slacker discovers multi-purpose use for efi/boot partition to serve as boot, over-provisioning, and shareable live-usb-storage!
(I’m hammering these boot sticks with the Gazelle-installer like they were hd’s, and not using the awesome persistence features …)
Over-provisioning. What’s that? We can go down this rabbit-hole, but simply it is an unformatted partition space to ensure that the controller on the stick has an unused nand cell playground all it’s own for garbage collection and wear-leveling. Some quality sticks already have this hidden from the user. But some may not have it! You may never see a spec for it.
So we’ll be generous and take matters into our own hands when installing by feeding it some unformatted space without becoming a jedi-partitioning-master. Or for those cases where the installer won’t let you get funky.
Normally I simply manually format my F2FS sticks this way with only two partitions. Adjust to your needs in this example.
1) 512mb ESP. Fat32
2) F2FS for / (root) for the rest of the drive.
The trick I’m using is to start the manual installation with a huge fat32 ESP partition, like 10Gb (I’m using a 64gb stick). The rest for F2FS. Finish installation, but DON’T REBOOT.
Instead, we’ll simply shrink the huge fat32 ESP partition with Gparted so that it leaves something like 10 percent of the stated drivespace in between it and the F2FS. Over-provisioning is usually anywhere from 8 to 15 percent (rabbit hole time) so I’ll stick to 10 percent. And who knows – my stick may already have some hidden away from the consumer, but I don’t know that, so I’ll err on the safe side, and just be generous. So now my unformatted space in between is around 6.5Gb. Close enough.
Since you can’t shrink F2FS, no big deal, I’ll just shrink the fat32 esp. UNMOUNT NICELY before reboot. Yeah, Gparted might complain a little at this point after shrinkage, but don’t freak – we’re going to nicely unmount and reboot anyway.
Shareable Storage:
Well, now that the 10GB fat32 esp has been shrunk to accomodate the overprovisioning, you can still use the monstrously huge efi/boot for usb-storage space too for windows machines, or whatever little files you want to put there to transfer from system to system. I resist the urge to put big files there, like usb-snapshots though. However, I suppose if you were to simply divide your stick into two monster partitions, (minus the new overprovisioning) it might not matter so much.
This reads like a lot, but it’s not a big deal when you actually do it. I’m going to use this technique on my faster sticks, sata ssd’s, and nvme drives too. One can get all rabbit-hole about it, but I’ll just think of it as good practice.
- This reply was modified 1 year ago by PDP-8.
- This reply was modified 1 year ago by PDP-8. Reason: typos