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Date:      Tue, 26 Sep 2000 04:30:59 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        "David J. Kanter" <david.kanter@mindspring.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Max partitions per slice
Message-ID:  <14800.27859.773098.863042@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <20000925194551.A7790@freebsd.mindspring.com>
References:  <99824587@toto.iv> <14799.22594.938807.141382@guru.mired.org> <20000925194551.A7790@freebsd.mindspring.com>

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David J. Kanter writes:
> On Mon, Sep 25, 2000 at 08:50:58AM -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:
> > Of course, I've never seen
> > anyone who needed more than 7 active partitions, so I've not seen it
> > done.
> Fair enough. What partitioning scheme do you recommend?

As usual, the correct answer to that question is "it depends". I've
done just / and /var for servers, and my last install (a system for
testing some commercial software on) had nothing but /.

> This will be just a home machine. /tmp and /var generally seem like good
> candidates for separate file systems. Does breaking up /usr into /usr/src
> and /usr/obj seem foolish? All of this will be on one disk.

For a personal workstation, I'd say /, /usr and /home (or whatever you
want to call the local stuff). /home gets separated from the system so
I can move "just my stuff" easily if I need to. Some fairly sharp
people believe a / & /usr split is no longer needed, but I have
different backup strategies for / and /usr. For servers - which
presumably will be logging things to /var frequently - I'd add
/var. /tmp can be left alone, mounted on mfs or md, symlinked to a
different partition (which means some things won't work until it's
mounted) or mounted on a small partion. Personally, I add said small
partition to swap and put it on mfs, just so it gets cleaned across
reboots.

Putting /usr/src and /usr/obj in separate partitions on the same disk
seems very foolish. You've just *guaranteed* lots of head movement on
that disk when doing a make. I leave /usr/obj on /usr, and symlink
/usr/src to a second disk. That way I get the benefit of overlapping
I/O operations (you need SCSI or different IDE controllers for that),
and if /usr gets fried, I can rebuild from the src on the second disk.

> Oh, and what do you think about sizes for those partitions?

/ can be very small; 32MB is doable, but a bit tight. 64MB is more
than enough.  If you need more than that for /var, you probably
shouldn't put /var on / anyway. You may want to move /compat/linux off
of root.

Swap has to be twice memory (+ any mfs space) so the system can do a
core dump on crashes. If you can afford the disk space, more isn't a
bad thing.

/usr - with src & obj on it - a gig. If you're going to be building
lots of ports and not cleaning up, more. I have 2 gig, src (> 500meg)
elsewhere, and nothing but the system and ports on /usr, and I run out
of room pretty regularly. That means I have to do a "make clean" in
the ports tree.

	<mike



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