Alex Samad wrote:
my 2c, with the size of HD's and the processing power we have now, I really wonder if spending more than a second on deciding on a single partition or not is worth it. Are the amount of space lost - expressed as a percentage of the disk really worth all the time being spent on it ?
I think so, yes. My /usr/local may vary by more than 50G (very quickly, but very rarely), for example. When it's not eating up ~60-80G, I'd like this space to be available for something else, probably /home.
So, it's either binding/linking the trees on a single filesystem (what I would call a hack), using LVM more than I should, or stopping just a second to think about the advantages of partitioning that I can afford to lose.
And the cpu overhead for using separate partitions and lvm - again with todays cpus....
Hmm, it works the other way around: you usually get performance boosts *from* the separation of your volumes. Even if you simply want the best performance, and you have the time and interest to actually look into it, you might still find yourself wondering, like me, if it is necessary at all to think about any volume layout.
(Since we're talking about the burden of thinking, I'd say going with a single root filesystem is quite easier.)
Now, as we just discussed, it's not all about CPU and disk space, but sometimes about practicalities (reinstallation, block level operations, boot) or safety (mount options, filesystem corruption containment, free space issues).
my default laptop build is partition 1 /boot - ext2 or ext3 about 500M - 1G swap = to mem - my last 3 laptops have >3G memory so if I am swapping there is something wrongrest = 1 big partitions currently ext4
As it seems you're already alright with losing the benefits of partitioning (except for your boot partition, which might not even be necessary in your case), but most people still believe it's better to take the time to separate the data into several filesystems (even just a few), for a workstation.
-thib