Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 04:56:14 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Graham Perrin <grahamperrin@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Partitioning Message-ID: <20210213045614.71f2202b.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <055e547a-c57a-048e-5458-4cf60b31ca7a@gmail.com> References: <CAAwGzWvpKnNga60ywPRj1J4rN_CJkcGwboTkcaTwoNrRC6HBhA@mail.gmail.com> <055e547a-c57a-048e-5458-4cf60b31ca7a@gmail.com>
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On Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:19:33 +0000, Graham Perrin wrote: > On 11/02/2021 20:32, david russell wrote: > > > In my opinion an all in 1 partition is a disaster waiting to happen. > > In what way? If you have things like /tmp, /var/log, /home and so rooted in the same partition, a "runaway process" could fill your whole disk just writing to /tmp, and you wouldn't know, because a log file can no longer be written. Also users might be affected and cannot save their work files as /home runs out of space (simply because / is full). Especially on systems providing server functionalities, this kind of problem is not desired. Another useful thing about partitioning is that you can backup and restore partition-wise. You can also use different mount options (such as noatime where you don't need it, and even noexec when you want to prevent accidental executions). You can also "switch" between certain environments or even /home subtrees if needed. For large-scale data recovery, it's also easier to work with separated partitions, for example, if you need to recover something from /home, you can leave /usr, /tmp, and /var out of scope entirely, and those partitions won't be subject to recovery attempts - you can concentrate on /home. However, this partitioning approach is historically grown (as it initially wasn't about partitions on the same disk, but about different physical swappable disks with limited capacity as well different speed) and doesn't fit all modern needs. Especially for home system, having one / partition often is the best solution. And UFS's fixed size partitioning (with previous planning!) doesn't make it fit for changing purposes. > Have you tried accepting the ZFS option? The initial question probably was UFS-centered, as with using ZFS, you can resize partitions any time you want, and it's a lot easier to manage them. Everything mentioned above can easily be done with ZFS, and more. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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