Re: Partition suggestions.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 08:15:35PM +0000, Nuno Magalh??es wrote:
> Greetings.
>
> Yes, it's a religous question but i'll try to lmit it.
> This is my df -h
>
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda4 13G 8.6G 3.6G 71% /
> tmpfs 991M 0 991M 0% /lib/init/rw
> udev 10M 76K 10M 1% /dev
> tmpfs 991M 0 991M 0% /dev/shm
> /dev/sda10 373M 11M 343M 3% /tmp
> /dev/sda7 4.6G 3.7G 731M 84% /usr
> /dev/sda8 2.8G 387M 2.3G 15% /var
> /dev/sda6 100G 78G 23G 78% /mnt/win64
>
> 1) What's with those two tmpfs? Are (both) really necessary? Isn't swap enough?
tmpfs are ramdisks for temporary files. They have nothing to do with
swap. In fact they can use swap space just like anything else that uses
ram can use swap space. using a ramdisk is faster than using normal
disk space, and you don't have to worry about cleaning up on reboot.
> /mnt/win64 is a FAT32 that will become ext3, it has most of my
> personal stuff. I want to leave most of the disk for my /home and
> 8.2GB of / are actually my /home already, meaning i have about 86GB of
> user files (the biggest chunk of it in a folder called "to_filter").
>
> This is a regular desktop and i'm gonna do a reinstallation. These
> partitions were done automatically 'cos i was already counting on a
> reinstall - there's a 20GB XP Pro partition that's gonna be reduced to
> 15GB if i don't decide to wipe it out completely (oh, wait, games...).
>
> Usually i use / and /home only. This is a 160GB Maxtor drive.
> 2) How about 20GB for / and everything else for /home?
Sounds sensible to me.
> 3) is it worth it to separate /var and /usr on a desktop system? Why?
> Why not? What sizes?
More partitions mean you are more likely to run out of space on one,
while having plenty left somewhere else.
> 4) What's standard on keeping important parts of the filesystem from
> being full and halting the system? Once i did have / full and it was
> crazy to fix it 'cos it wouldn't boot.
Well one reason for seperate /var is that /var/log and /var/lib
(databases and such) can grow very quickly and cause such problems.
/home is kept seperate because you don't want normal users to fill the
disk (although the reserved space does help avoid issues if they try).
My latest install uses:
25G / (raid 1 on sda1 and sdb1)
25G /home (raid 1 on sdc1 and sdd1)
LVM PV (raid 5 on sda2, sdb2, sdc2 and sdd2)
Swap and /var (for mythtv storage and mysql and such) in LVM. LVM is
handy since I can add and remove volumes and resize them without any of
the problems caused by partitions.
/ (or at least /boot) had to stay out of raid5/LVM since grub doesn't
support that yet (GRUB2 might some day when it is released).
--
Len Sorensen
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