partition management in dual-boot laptop / limited space

[Rick Stevens]

On 01/06/2016 10:23 AM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 6 January 2016 at 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2016-01-06 at 13:30 +0000, Ian Malone wrote:
>>> Is there any less drastic approach?
>>
>> You don't really explain your use case. I find it's enough to run the
>> occasional Windows session in a VM, but if you depend on high-
>> performance 3D graphics (e.g. for gaming) that may not be enough. For
>> most everything else it's fine.
>>
>
> This is probably better now than it was before, but with a two core
> system and not a massive amount of RAM it seems a better use to dual
> boot on the laptop (and on my desktop I dual boot because that's
> exactly what I use windows for). Allowing access to the shared
> partition (music and other data) means I can get at that from both
> sides of a dual boot, I can install windows programs there if
> necessary to avoid having a large chunk of space stuck in a c:\
> partition or VM image. That would be a bit harder from a VM (if
> possible at all, not sure filesystem passthrough will work for a
> windows client, samba is awful). Also, my windows license is a
> hardware one, not for VM. I can only see the windows in a vm helping
> in this situation if there's a neat way to give it fairly transparent
> access to a filesystem on the host machine.

Referring to your original post, I don't really see a huge benefit to
having separate / and /home partitions unless you're planning to do
partition-based backups and restores. Back in the day when we backed up
to tape and such with limited capacities, it made sense. Now that
external hard drives are so prevalent and cost-effective, it doesn't
track as well.

As to LVM, I like it from the standpoint that it is fairly easy to
move things around if you want, and should you run out of space on
your disk, you can add a second drive, make a PV out of it, add it to
the VG your current LV is on, then grow your LV onto the new disk and
expand the filesystem. For the vast majority of people, using LVM is
really is somewhat "six of one, half dozen of the other". For people
like me who do a lot of development or whose datasets are big (and my
datasets just keep growing!), LVM (and the minor amount of care and
feeding it requires) works well.
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