From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Dec 7 18:52:27 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1368B37B417 for ; Fri, 7 Dec 2001 18:52:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.11.6/8.11.5) with SMTP id fB82pti58681; Fri, 7 Dec 2001 21:51:55 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 21:51:54 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Matthew Dillon Cc: "Louis A. Mamakos" , Sheldon Hearn , Kirk McKusick , freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Using a larger block size on large filesystems In-Reply-To: <200112072325.fB7NPBl95329@apollo.backplane.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Matthew Dillon wrote: > :While we're gonna be changing the default file system characteristics, > :how about having sysinstall create a reasonable size root file system > :for today's disks? I think that if we're installing on a multi-gigabyte > :disk, a 200MB root file system isn't imposing very much. > > I talked with Jordan about doing this a few months ago and he > essentially gave the O.K. (I think his exact words were 'go do it', > but he tends to say that whenever anyone asks for a new feature in > sysinstall). > > In any case, I think it's time has come. I'll rework the sysinstall > stuff today and put it up for comment. While we can discuss the merits of doing this for the -STABLE branch, I for one will be quite happy to see this be the case for -CURRENT, where storing three complete sets of kernels and modules (kernel.new, kernel.old, and kernel.dontworryaboutmeiamsafe) consumes vast amounts of disk space with the various debugging symbols, et al. BTW, we keep suggesting people would be foolish to use anything other than MFS/md for /tmp (and maybe other variations on tmp), but our sysinstall doesn't support doing this "automagically". I'm not sure what the right vehicle is for that in sysinstall, but it would be nice to see. Another interesting problem with the current partition layout is the extremely small size of /var, on which we find /var/tmp, which is used for package unpacking before installation. For large packages, such as KDE, LaTeX, and friends, this can be a big problem, as well as for vmware which likes to drop huge paging files into /var/tmp. Combining these various temporary spaces into a single md partition sized to something appropriate might make sense. This is seperate issue from the root partition, of course, but something we might want to look into a strateg for. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message