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Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:37:57 -0600 (CST)
From: Robert Bonomi <bonomi@mail.r-bonomi.com>
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To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <4F3ECF23.5000706@fisglobal.com>
Subject: Re: One or Four?
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> From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org  Fri Feb 17 16:20:48 2012
> Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:05:23 -0800
> From: "Robison, Dave" <david.robison@fisglobal.com>
> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
> Subject: One or Four?
>
> Hiya,
>
> A question has arisen with the implementation of bsdinstall in 9.x as 
> opposed to sysinstall in 8.x and previous versions of FreeBSD.
>
> It has always been FreeBSD's default to create four partitions and swap 
> as such:
>
> /
> /tmp
> /var
> /usr
> swap
>
> The recent changes in 9.x with bsdinstall use a default behavior which 
> creates only one partition and swap, with everything living under a 
> single "/" partition as such:
>
> /
> swap

Blame the Linux community for fostering _that_ silliness.   <wry grin>

> We'd like a show of hands to see if folks prefer the "old" style default 
> with 4 partitions and swap, or the newer iteration with 1 partition and 
> swap.

*I* would stronngly prefer _five_ partitions plus swap;

  /
  /tmp
  /var
  /usr
  /home
  swap

There are good arguments to be made for keeping the '/' filesystem as small 
as practical, _and_ restricting it to 'system' content -- preferably all
"non-volatile" such that it (as well as '/usr') can be mounted read-only.

The above-mentioned RO mounting does wonders for system reliability and 
speed of crash recovery.