Re: merged /usr considered harmful (was Re: Bits from the Technical Committee)
Polyna-Maude Racicot-Summerside <debian@polynamaude.com> writes:
> Here's my actual config (with 2TB) and yes I have a separate /home
> What is tmpfs and why is it set to 3.2 GB ?
tmpfs is a RAM-backed temporary file system that is automatically used for
paths like /run and /dev/shm that are supposed to be cleared on each
reboot and hold only small files (or memory references, in the case of
/dev/shm).
I see that you have your system configured to store /tmp on your disk.
This is generally not recommended these days. Storing /tmp in tmpfs is
much faster for some applications and automatically achieves the desired
and standard /tmp behavior of clearing it on reboot. About the only
reason not to use tmpfs is if you have a very memory-constrained system
and don't want to use any member at all for memory-backed file systems.
> And /dev have 16G free ? Where does this come from...
The size of the udev file system is essentially meaningless.
> I'm wasting some space with /tmp !
I agree with the other feedback that you are overpartitioning your disk.
I used to do this back when I was first learning UNIX in the 1990s because
it seems like a good idea and it does isolate one part of the system from
another if it uses an excessive amount of space. But what I found in
practice, and what almost everyone who does this eventually finds in
practice, is that this much partitioning drastically reduces the long-term
flexibility of the system. It requires you predict in advance what parts
of the system will grow, and when you guess wrong, you end up with
symlinks trying to move directories from a partition with no free space to
another partition with free space, with all the complexity and breakage
that can cause.
There are some technical reasons to separate /boot if you are using a file
system for other partitions that isn't suitable for early boot (or if
you're using cryptsetup or other file system layers). /boot/efi is always
a separate partition because of how it works. Apart from those two
special cases, the only reason to put something on a separate file system
is if you have a clear and compelling reason why you expect a given file
system to run out of space and you want to ensure that it cannot take
space from other parts of the system.
This can be a good justification for putting /home on a separate partition
*if* you are running a multi-user system. But otherwise, separating out
things like /var or /usr/local or /opt or /srv is more likely to cause you
long-term headaches than it is to do anything useful.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: