Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:26:40 -0400 From: Bob Johnson <bob89@eng.ufl.edu> To: ross@axe.homelinux.net Cc: FreeBSD-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: /boot on a separate partition Message-ID: <200507191426.40842.bob89@eng.ufl.edu>
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Garance A Drosihn wrote: > At 9:30 PM +0100 7/18/05, Ross Kendall Axe wrote: > > > >... I want to place the /boot directory in a small 25MB partition > >at the start of the drive. Setting up the partition with sysinstall > >is easy enough, but does anyone have any suggestions of how to > >diddle the bootloader to accept this configuration? > > I doubt you can on FreeBSD. The problem is that the OS would have > to mount both / and /boot before it could do anything, and FreeBSD > doesn't do that. It assumes the partition that you are loading > from is '/', and uses that to find (for instance) /etc/fstab so > it can find out what the other partitions are. > > I know that linux supports this, as well as some other clever > trickery with partitions at system-startup, but FreeBSD doesn't. > > >I don't particularly want to go for the standard 'small / partition > >and separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home...' since I only have > >a 1GB drive to play with and judging the partition sizes down the > >nearest KB would be... tricky. > > Create a small-ish / partition, a swap partition, and huge /usr > partition. If you want to play with FreeBSD, that's the way to go. You can probably get away with a 40 MB / partition, 55 MB is almost certainly large enough. The two things in / that grow in normal use are /tmp and /var/log. Make /tmp either a symlink to something on /usr, or mount it as a memory disk (see mdconfig(8)). The default logging doesn't accumulate terribly fast anyway, so /var/log isn't very important. If you handle mail or do printing, /var/spool and /var/mail might grow, but usually not enough to be a major issue. The rest of /var probably won't grow enough to matter. On a 1 GB drive you aren't going to have room to do much learning no matter how little you waste in /. Maybe I should just ship you a bigger hard drive. I'm pretty sure I have a 3 or 6 GB drive around that I have no use for. Are you willing to pay shipping? > > FreeBSD creates a symlink from /home to /usr/home, so > your home directories are in /usr anyway. > That's true if you don't create an explicit /home partition. If you WANT /home to be a separate partition (makes updating easier/safer), then create it, but in this case it probably isn't desirable. - Bob
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