Pretty much a partitioning question. 2 or 6 partitions? Usage and or benefit of higher lower number of partitions? Didn't Red Hat install multiply partitions in earlier versions?
Michael P Angell wrote:
Pretty much a partitioning question. 2 or 6 partitions? Usage and or benefit of higher lower number of partitions? Didn't Red Hat install multiply partitions in earlier versions
Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to Linux/Fedora, so take my advice with a grain of salt
/boot is nice to have on a separate partition for various reasons. It doesn't grow out of bounds, either, so it's an easy choice. Everything else lives perfectly well on / most of the time I've heard somewhere that it's nice to have /home on a separate partition for smoother upgrades (read: reinstalls), but that seems like a lot of work, since both /home and /usr like to grow in size.. It's definitely easier to make a mistake than in case of /boot.
Of course none of this would be an issue if there weren't any legal problems with a certain filesystem that will go unmentioned so as to not start another flame war :)
HTH
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:25:53PM -0500, Michael P Angell waffled thusly:
Pretty much a partitioning question. 2 or 6 partitions? Usage and or benefit of higher lower number of partitions? Didn't Red Hat install multiply partitions in earlier versions?
Each partition will consume a small amount of space in simple overhead (Reserved blocks etc) so if you want to get the absolute max out of your drive, then fewer partitions the better.
That being said, there's wisdom in using separate partitions for /boot, /home and / (root) - this makes disaster recovery easier (short of catastrophic hardware failure you won't lose it all) and a discrete /home makes it easier to migrate / export it to other machines.
Depending on usage you can vary this (I often have /var/spool for servers etc.)
- Michael Fleming.
On 9/27/07, Michael Fleming mfleming@enlartenment.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:25:53PM -0500, Michael P Angell waffled thusly:
Pretty much a partitioning question. 2 or 6 partitions? Usage and or benefit of higher lower number of partitions? Didn't Red Hat install multiply partitions in earlier versions?
Each partition will consume a small amount of space in simple overhead (Reserved blocks etc) so if you want to get the absolute max out of your drive, then fewer partitions the better.
That being said, there's wisdom in using separate partitions for /boot, /home and / (root) - this makes disaster recovery easier (short of catastrophic hardware failure you won't lose it all) and a discrete /home makes it easier to migrate / export it to other machines.
Depending on usage you can vary this (I often have /var/spool for servers etc.)
- Michael Fleming.
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I've always wondered about having separate / and /boot. After all one cannot function without the other.
~Aldo.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 10:16:25AM +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
I've always wondered about having separate / and /boot. After all one cannot function without the other.
/boot cannot exist on an LVM.
Although the original reason was to insure it was in the area of the disk old BIOSes were restricted to booting from, for LILO's benefit. And I'm sure once the LVM thing is solved, there will be some new problem it solves. :)
Matthew Miller wrote:
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 10:16:25AM +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
I've always wondered about having separate / and /boot. After all one cannot function without the other.
/boot cannot exist on an LVM.
Although the original reason was to insure it was in the area of the disk old BIOSes were restricted to booting from, for LILO's benefit. And I'm sure once the LVM thing is solved, there will be some new problem it solves. :)
The Grub works fine from another partition but it takes a very careful setup in grub.conf to make it work. I have never liked LVM because it takes a whole lot of space and I am not sure why.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 05:28:17AM -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:
I have never liked LVM because it takes a whole lot of space and I am not sure why.
More appropriately for me, I haven't liked LVM because it makes recovery so difficult. The tools and procedures simply aren't mature enough; the advantage given by LVM isn't worth it to me. -- Dave Ihnat President, DMINET Consulting, Inc. dihnat@dminet.com
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:56:34PM -0700, Aldo Foot wrote:
I've always wondered about having separate / and /boot. After all one cannot function without the other.
There are, as has been mentioned, historic reasons for this. But also--you can't boot from a software RAID array, so in that case /boot is a simple partition. In simple mirroring configurations, I usually go ahead and create a /bootsav partition on the other drive so the partition tables are the same--it makes maintenance easier, and with a simple cron job provides an on-system copy of the /boot partition if you have to switch to the other drive. -- Dave Ihnat President, DMINET Consulting, Inc. dihnat@dminet.com
There are, as has been mentioned, historic reasons for this. But also--you can't boot from a software RAID array, so in that case /boot is a simple partition. In simple mirroring configurations, I usually go ahead and
You can boot from raid1 - but of course its actually booting from the one disk in reality not from the mirrored set.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 02:07:20PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
You can boot from raid1 - but of course its actually booting from the one disk in reality not from the mirrored set.
Ah--*software* RAID1? At boot time, it doesn't know about /dev/mdX.
Cheers, -- Dave Ihnat dihnat@dminet.com
On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:13:52 -0500 Dave Ihnat dihnat@dminet.com wrote:
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 02:07:20PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
You can boot from raid1 - but of course its actually booting from the one disk in reality not from the mirrored set.
Ah--*software* RAID1? At boot time, it doesn't know about /dev/mdX.
Yes. The software raid volume as /dev/sda1 or similar is understood by the BIOS just fine, and since both have the same data works fine.
-----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@redhat.com on behalf of Dave Ihnat Sent: Fri 09/28/2007 09:13 AM To: Alan Cox Cc: For users of Fedora Subject: Re: How to get the most out of HD space.
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 02:07:20PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
You can boot from raid1 - but of course its actually booting from the one disk in reality not from the mirrored set.
Ah--*software* RAID1? At boot time, it doesn't know about /dev/mdX. ---------------------------
I'm pretty sure the system does know about /dev/mdX at boot time... I'm looking at one of my old RHL 9 servers (Yes... it's due for an upgrade!) and my filesystems are laid out as:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/md0 8160056 4111096 3634452 54% / /dev/md2 19891 6232 12632 34% /boot /dev/md3 108963128 101667576 1760508 99% /disk0
and grub.conf says:
default=0 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-31.9) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-31.9 ro root=/dev/md0 initrd /initrd-2.4.20-31.9.img
and the fdisk output:
Disk /dev/hdg: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 238216 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdg1 * 1 41 20632+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/hdg2 42 16490 8290296 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/hdg3 16491 18571 1048824 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/hdg4 18572 238216 110701080 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hdg5 18572 238216 110701048+ fd Linux raid autodetect
Disk /dev/hde: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 238216 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hde1 * 1 41 20632+ fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/hde2 42 16490 8290296 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/hde3 16491 18571 1048824 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/hde4 18572 238216 110701080 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hde5 18572 238216 110701048+ fd Linux raid autodetect
and, now, re-reading my email... since grub says "root (hd0,0)" does that indicate that it is only going to read hdg at boot time? If I were to create a second boot option in grub.conf with "root (hd1,0)", then could I get it to boot from hde? I guess there would also have to be a way to tell the BIOS to look at hde for the MBR?
Sorry for raising more questions than answers!
and, now, re-reading my email... since grub says "root (hd0,0)" does that indicate that it is only going to read hdg at boot time? If I were to create a second boot option in grub.conf with "root (hd1,0)", then could I get it to boot from hde? I guess there would also have to be a way to tell the BIOS to look at hde for the MBR?
That depends on the BIOS disk order. If you have BIOS disks 0 and 1 as your two disks and the boot data is set to boot of hd0,0 (on both) then usually if disk 0 fails the BIOS thinks of the second disk as disk 0 and it works, depends a lot on the BIOS
Dave Ihnat wrote:
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:56:34PM -0700, Aldo Foot wrote:
I've always wondered about having separate / and /boot. After all one cannot function without the other.
There are, as has been mentioned, historic reasons for this. But also--you can't boot from a software RAID array, so in that case /boot is a simple partition. In simple mirroring configurations, I usually go ahead and create a /bootsav partition on the other drive so the partition tables are the same--it makes maintenance easier, and with a simple cron job provides an on-system copy of the /boot partition if you have to switch to the other drive.
You can put /boot on a raid1 partition and the boot loader will treat either mirror as a normal file system and boot from it. You may or may not be able to make the 2nd drive boot automatically if the primary fails because it will depend on how the bios handles the bad drive, but you can always reconfigure it and fix up grub by booting a cd in rescue mode. The thing I like about software raid1 is that if your machine melts to the point there there is nothing working but a single disk, you'd be able to plug that into any compatible controller and recover the data on it.
On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 18:25 -0500, Michael P Angell wrote:
Pretty much a partitioning question. 2 or 6 partitions? Usage and or benefit of higher lower number of partitions? Didn't Red Hat install multiply partitions in earlier versions?
It used to, and still does. The number of them has changed. ;-)
As others have pointed out, there's advantages to having separate /, /boot/ and /home/ partitions. I have more partitions, still. Since I have a large drive, with oodles of space, I didn't worry too much about one of them being filled up.
I included separate partitions for the following mount points, and there's a few reasons why you might do that listed along with them (my own, and traditional reasons). Naturally, not all reasons are applicable to all situations.
/tmp - It doesn't seem so much of an issue with Linux, but on another system, lots of programs were always making lots of little temporary files. That does add to drive fragementation, and it's better not to fragment a partition that you want good speed with. Sometimes it's convenient to be able to wipe out old temporary files when booting up a system that's gone doolally. Reformatting a /tmp partition can be easier than trying to wildcard delete scads of files, if there's enough for the command to be too long to execute. Amongst other things, this gets used for creating ISO files for burning discs, it needs to be big enough to hold them plus other temporary files. If you had a system that made heavy use of temp files, you might even use a separate drive for it, so the system can use both drives simultaneously, instead of consecutively. Having this as a separate mount makes it easy to apply restrictions to it, so that doesn't allow execution of files on it, etc., that's an aid against some security flaws with some software (e.g. some webservers).
/usr - Files in here aren't usually needed to boot a system, it's additional files for what you do with your system (e.g. non-OS, ancillary stuff). Having it separate can help with some recovery operations. It can even be network mounted, so that one installation of software is shared between terminals as if each had the same set of software installed. Having this as a separate mount makes it easy to apply restrictions to it, e.g. as a write-protected partition, etc., that's an aid against some security flaws with some software.
/var - Files in here may change a lot, using a separate partition would help with fragmentation issues (NB: I've already said this isn't much of an issue with Linux). If you had a system that made heavy use of files in /var, you might even use a separate drive for it, so the system can use both drives simultaneously, instead of consecutively. Having this as a separate mount makes it easy to apply restrictions to it, so that doesn't allow execution of files on it, etc., that's an aid against some security flaws with some software (e.g. some servers).
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Alan Cox -
Aldo Foot -
Dave Ihnat -
Ed Greshko -
Karl Larsen -
Konstantin Svist -
Les Mikesell -
Matthew Miller -
Michael Angell -
Michael Fleming -
Miner, Jonathan W (US SSA) -
Tim