Re: About to format the whole laptop, need some partitioning advice.

["Schlacta, Christ" <aarcane@aarcane.org>]

3) Use ZFS.  Allocate the drive as a single zpool.  You can then create
   zfs volumes for all the separate bits.  However, you don't have the
   space wastage issues since all the data is in a single pool, and
   you can adjust the size allocations/quotas on demand for each
   individual volume (or leave them unset to give them as much space as
   they can get).  Needs a kernel patch for the zfs driver.  With
   kFreeBSD you can do this natively.  It has all sorts of great
   features which I won't go into here.

I've tried all three.  For Linux, using LVM is easy and can be done
in the installer.  If you reinstall you can keep the LVs you want and
wipe/delete the rest.  For kFreeBSD, you can install directly onto ZFS;
I've been using it for kFreeBSD and native FreeBSD installs, and it's
the best of the lot--hopefully Debian can offer native support for
Linux at some point [currently needs patching, and the patches don't
work with current 3.12 kernels]

 

 I use zfs with debian wheezy, and am migrating to using zfs almost exclusively for my local deployments.  The "kernel patches" are actually just an add-on module that builds and installs from a repo maintained for wheezy, which uses DKMS to manage the actual kernel module.

As for not working with 3.12,   that's a known issue, and a patch is in head.  The ZFS team is closing a few more bugs and preparing a new release of ZFS soon, which will build against 3.12.  

There's currently discussion on one of the debian lists (I forget which) about removing the possibility of having nearly-native zfs support in debian-installer  I'm wasn't subscribed to the list at the time of the last post to this thread, so I can't reply to it.  Unfortunately, due to the nature of the CDDL (The license ZFS is under), No Linux distro will ever be able to deploy native binary modules with the installer or in default repositories any time soon.

ZFS is awesome, and I've never lost any data using ZFS, despite some bad situations including marginal drives and even drive failure.  I highly recommend this solution for everyone who's competent enough to understand the procedures involved and the achievable benefits. Unfortunately, due to the proprietary nature of the CDDL, I don't foresee this being a solution "for the masses" any time soon.