Ron Herardian <rherardi@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> When installing everything and allowing for future updates and packages
> I am using the following disk layout:
... 7 partitions listed ...
It may be time to rethink multiple partitions. For legacy reasons,
I build my systems with multiple partitions, but if I had it to do
over again I would probably do it with 3 partitions:
/boot (because it has to be small)
swap (about 2 GB)
/ (everything else, including multiple drives if LVM)
For the average system, the swap probably should be smaller, but I
run huge, poorly designed CAD apps for days that tend to fill VM.
With RAM so damned cheap these days, I agree with other folks that
make swap a lot smaller than 2x physical RAM. Paging more than a
few hundred megabytes of swap is just too damned slow, regardless
of the amount of RAM that you happen to have in your system.
If I had a problem with users writing huge files that filled the disk,
I would put quotas on the individual users, not on their partition as
a whole. If anything goes wild, and fills up /, the system is in
trouble anyway, and repair time is not significantly improved by
limiting the fillup to one of many partitions. In fact, a lot of
problems happen because /tmp fills, or /var/mail fills and /var/log
doesn't work. I subscribe to the Andrew Carnegie maxim "Put all
your eggs in one basket - then WATCH THAT BASKET".
My past excuses for multiple partitions were: (1) limited disk sizes
and (2) managing backup tapes. Both are invalid now. With large
drives and LVM, there is no practical limit on partition sizes for
most systems. With disk-to-disk random access backup, there is no
need for complicated partition arrangements to fit data onto small,
slow tapes. I control backup frequencies and depth by directory,
not by partition.
On mild excuse for retaining multiple partitions is to minimize
boot time - if you are running a journalling file system, it will
occasionally delay booting for significant time to fsck one or two
of the partitions. But if you have a very large /home, the time
saved by peeling off a bunch of smaller partitions is not that
significant. There are probably better ways to schedule fsck.
I expect strong opinions differing from the above; no doubt I've
forgotten something. Newbies should keep following this thread and
see where I've erred. But a lot of the reasons we do things are
traditions that stem from past restrictions that no longer apply.
We should acknowledge these changes in our system designs.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl@xxxxxxxx Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
