Re: Suggestion for systemd and /usr on seperate partition
On Thu, 30 Oct 2014 19:30:54 +0100
Peter Nieman <gmane-acct@t-online.de> wrote:
> On 30/10/14 17:48, berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
> > Hum... I think I always have seen the installer on "all in one
> > partition (beginners)"?
> > If you have selected this one, then, you should not have problems
> > because of stuff not mounted.
>
> I guess you're right that there was an option to have everything in
> one partition. Frankly, I don't remember what the installer menu in
> Squeeze looked like. But anyway, what's the meaning of "all in one
> partition (beginners)"? I wasn't a "beginner" at that time, so maybe
> I thought that this option doesn't apply to me. ;-)
>
> A couple of years ago the advice given by most experts in newsgroups,
> Linux books etc. was to *not* put everything in one partition, and
> the installer definitely didn't recommend the opposite or even warn
> against it.
You learn as you go. The general rule of thumb is that there's not much
to be gained on a workstation by using multiple partitions, though some
people maintain that a swap partition is a little better than a swap
file. I believe the 'all-in-one' installer option still uses a separate
swap partition.
On a server, running unattended most of the time, you really don't want
a problem which generates large amounts of /var stuff to shut down the
computer, so at least /var ought to be separate. There was once a
theory that /usr would be read-only and contain user applications,
possibly for multiple users on a networked system. In reality, a lot of
system stuff seems to have spilled over into /usr, and even /bin
and /sbin are supposed to be symlinked from it, so it needs to be
available during boot. I wasn't able recently to find any instructions
for mounting it during boot, so the easy way is to keep it in /.
> And the partition sizes suggested by the installer were
> wrong.
>
>
Funny, that. Though not nearly as funny as with Windows, where the
system partition is *always* underspecified, a full system partition
means a reinstall, and log files are kept under the same top-level
directory as library binaries...
Yes, a few hundred megs were always OK for / if /usr and /var were
separate, but now the modules for a single kernel are well over 100MB,
and with Linux it's always a good idea to keep a spare kernel around.
/lib, where the modules live, absolutely has to be available at boot.
As to /home, it's useful to keep that separate if you expect to
reinstall, but in any case, /home will be regularly backed up somewhere
offline, won't it?
--
Joe
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