On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 6:40 AM Richard Shaw hobbes1069@gmail.com wrote:
- How is your drive/system laid out regarding your paritions?
SSDs are getting cheaper, but not cheap enough for mass storage for me so currently: 500GB M.2 NVMe boot/system drive
- /boot
- /boot/efi
- / and /var subvolumes sharing remaining space
- /home 3TB spinning disk
I like having /var as a separate volume because when it was EXT4 I could do a reinstall and format / without losing data in /var. I setup using subvolumes this time before I realized that was no longer possible. I guess it could make snapshots easier though...
The installer definitely let's you reuse an existing subvolume for the /home mount point (unless it's a snapshot [1]). I'm not certain about reusing a subvolume or snapshot for /var because it contains the RPM database which is inextricably linked to most everything in '/' except for /home. There isn't a very elegant way of dealing with this in the general case, let alone the specifics of snapshotting and rollbacks.
The installer will not let you reuse a file system for '/' however. There is an exception for Btrfs, which is it'll reuse an existing Btrfs, but it requires a new subvolume (created by the installer) for '/' mount point. That way it's possible to do a clean install while reusing a subvolume for /home.
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1885102