On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 06:13:54PM +0800, Kin Chung wrote: > In another thread related to ReiserFS, it has been mentioned > that it is a good idea to put various items in their own partitions > or even discs! This is fine if you have lots of discs or partitions > handy. > > On my iBook, I have theoretically got up to 15 partitions > (is it possible to have 16 if only the Mac stuff goes in there?), eh? since when do ibooks use scsi disks? in linux ide disks may have up to 63 partitions. MacOS your only limit is the number of file descriptors available, eventually if you have so many HFS partitions mounted (each with all that desktopdb crap open) you run out of file descriptors and thus can't do anything. since linux partitions are invisable to Macos they don't cause that problem. the mac partition table format has no real limit on the number of partitions, you can keep creating them until you run out of space in the partition table partition (which is 31K by default). > but the first 8 are taken up by MacOS rubbish (removal is not an > option at this stage), so I am left with 7. If I use 2 for MacOS 9.0.4, > then I have only 5 left, of which two are used for bootstrap and > swap. Now I am left with a mere three partitions. Not much room! if its an IDE disk you can have much more partitions then this. on my x86 box i used to have something like 28 partitions. (i was tinkering with several OSes/distros at the time). > Is it safe or reasonable to put a swap file in the bootstrap partition? no no and no. bootstrap partition should be 800K and never mounted anywhere. besides that putting swap on HFS filesystems is an EVIL idea. > I think security could be maintained by mounting (I don't know of > any way of using a swap file without mounting the partition) inside > of a suitably protected directory, and the partition would probably > want to be mounted synchronised, but I would like to know if there > are any problems with this idea. swap files suck since they are much slower. but as far as security and placement goes that doesn't matter, you can put them on any partition with enough space to hold them (just so its ext2) set the file's permissions to 0600 root.root. > I could reduce MacOS to one partition, but the thing needs a theraputic > re-install so often that this might not be too brilliant an idea. > > Other suggestions are welcome! see above, i think your idea that your limited to 15 partitions is erroneous. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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