Re: Disk partitions (Was: Upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2)


Subject: Re: Disk partitions (Was: Upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2)
From: Paul J. Lucas (pjl@barefooters.org)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 11:08:49 MST


On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Jim Cole wrote:

> Paul J. Lucas's bits of Tue, 7 Mar 2000 translated to:

> > 1 GB for / seems excessive. What I would recommend and why:

> Excessive? How so?

        Uh, excessive as in, after installation, most of / is empty
        space.

> Your suggestions below are *far* more excessive. In essence you are
> suggestion something like 2.4 GB where I am suggesting 1 GB.

        I draw a distinction between / and /usr.

> You are also allocating more than the 4 GB he had available ;)

        I must've missed that bit. I'm on a 6 GB drive.

> > 256 MB swap
> >
> > A simple formula: swap = 2 x memory (I have 127
> > MB of memory).

> In my opinion this formula is greatly outdated. In a well configured system,
> there is never a need for more than 128 MB of swap.

        Even if you were to have a gig. of memory? Be careful with
        words like "never."

> If that need ever arises, it is a sure sign that you desperately need more
> RAM.

        Not true. If somebody occasionally runs high-memory tasks,
        then, most of the time, the memory will be wasted. Disk is far
        cheaper than RAM. Even if you don't agree that swap should
        ever be above 128 MB, throwing an extra 128 MB at it on a
        multigigabyte disk will not be missed. (I almost said
        "never.")

> The rest is the part I referred to as a guessing game. If you try to do this
> type of partitioning and *really* know your needs, that is cool. And what you
> have looks quite reasonable. However what many people tend to do when trying
> this approach is to partition themselves into a complete reinstall not too
> far down the road.

        Oh I know. I've learned the hard way. I gave my
        recommendations based on experience so that one person (the
        original poster) could hopefully benefit and not have to end up
        doing a reinstall.

        My major complaint was putting too much on /. If that
        partition gets trashed somehow, you're in deep. Keeping
        non-root-ish stuff off of it seems prudent.

> If they go a bit too small on any critical partition, sooner or later they
> will have to reformat the drive to fix the problem.

        I know, but my partition sizes still left quite a lot of room
        for growth.

> Besides, this type of partitioning buys you very little; ... Other than for
> very flexible backup, as you suggest, and which can be done in other ways,
> there is much reason to use this type of partitioning. At least not in my
> experience or opinion :)

        Can you say "fsck?" (I find it amusing that it's only one
        letter different from the state you are in when you need to use
        it to repair a disk.)

        - Paul



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