default file system, was: Comparison to Workstation Technical Specification

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 2, 2014, at 9:35 PM, Nathanael Noblet <nathanael at gnat.ca> wrote:

> On 03/01/2014 04:57 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> The servers were rented with a Fedora produced default/automatic/guided partitioning layout? If not, your example is out of scope. We are only talking about this context specifically, not arbitrary examples for shrinking a file system. The Fedora automatic/guided partition layout is a rootfs of 50GB, and any significant additional space goes to a separate /home. So you're saying you'd shrink a 50GB rootfs for encrypted data, rather than blow away the /home LV, make a new LV, encrypt it, then format it?
> 
> They were CentOS 6 machines. So perhaps the defaults are different however this is something that happened to me and not being able to shrink a fs would have been problematic / costly for me. Granted the default there was /boot / and swap so I had a 900G / and nothing else thus the shrinking of the / fs. So I suppose that if the servers were fedora and had a /home LV this particular situation wouldn't have been an issue.
> 
> I just wanted to point out that shrinking a partition is a valid use case is all. In our current default fedora layout I could still accomplish what I needed. But shrinking a fs is a valid use case…

Fair enough, and I'm not suggesting shrink is invalid for that matter. I merely want to understand the actual requirement because there may be better ways to address it.

> 
> Given the XFS shrinking issue it might even be nice to not allocate ALL storage, create /, swap and /home without taking up all storage and then let people enlarge what they need…

It's an interesting suggestion. But does this really apply to the target audience of users who are a.) using a GUI installer, and b.) choosing to use an automatic/guided partitioning layout? Is that sort of user likely to jump into a resize operation from the command line post-install? Why wouldn't they just use Manual Partitioning?

What you suggest might seem plausible for Server. But I don't think that's a good idea for Workstation, to burden the user with an incomplete partition layout that (silently) proposes they complete or customize it post-install.



Chris Murphy