New subject: Fewer partitions are better (Re: Disk Layout/Partitioning Practices)

Wednesday, 28 January 2004

Ron Herardian <rherardi(a)gssnet.com&gt; writes:
...
 When installing everything and allowing for future updates and
packages
 I am using the following disk layout: ... 7 partitions listed ...

It may be time to rethink multiple partitions.  For legacy reasons,
I build my systems with multiple partitions, but if I had it to do
over again I would probably do it with 3 partitions:

     /boot (because it has to be small)
     swap  (about 2 GB)
     /     (everything else, including multiple drives if LVM)

For the average system, the swap probably should be smaller, but I
run huge, poorly designed CAD apps for days that tend to fill VM. 
With RAM so damned cheap these days, I agree with other folks that
make swap a lot smaller than 2x physical RAM.  Paging more than a
few hundred megabytes of swap is just too damned slow, regardless
of the amount of RAM that you happen to have in your system.  

If I had a problem with users writing huge files that filled the disk,
I would put quotas on the individual users, not on their partition as
a whole.  If anything goes wild, and fills up /,  the system is in
trouble anyway, and repair time is not significantly improved by
limiting the fillup to one of many partitions.  In fact, a lot of 
problems happen because /tmp fills, or /var/mail fills and /var/log
doesn't work.  I subscribe to the Andrew Carnegie maxim "Put all
your eggs in one basket - then WATCH THAT BASKET".

My past excuses for multiple partitions were:  (1) limited disk sizes
and (2) managing backup tapes.  Both are invalid now.  With large
drives and LVM, there is no practical limit on partition sizes for
most systems.  With disk-to-disk random access backup, there is no
need for complicated partition arrangements to fit data onto small,
slow tapes.  I control backup frequencies and depth by directory,
not by partition.

On mild excuse for retaining multiple partitions is to minimize 
boot time - if you are running a journalling file system, it will 
occasionally delay booting for significant time to fsck one or two
of the partitions.  But if you have a very large /home, the time
saved by peeling off a bunch of smaller partitions is not that 
significant.  There are probably better ways to schedule fsck.

I expect strong opinions differing from the above;  no doubt I've
forgotten something.  Newbies should keep following this thread and
see where I've erred.  But a lot of the reasons we do things are
traditions that stem from past restrictions that no longer apply.
We should acknowledge these changes in our system designs.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl(a)ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs