On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 07:57:50AM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> Using one big "a" partition means:
>
> - higher risk of filesystem damage to system partitions after an
> unsafe restart (crash, power failure): if a partition isn't actively
> written to, it's less likely to suffer damage
>
> - missing protective flags (e.g. nodev, nosuid) that are set on
> mounts that don't need to hold device nodes/suid binaries
>
> * running a system configuration that is further away from what
> other users are running, increasing the chance that you'll run
> into bugs that others haven't found yet *
>
> The workaround some have been suggesting (using the i386 boot loader to
> run amd64) takes you *even further* from a standard configuration. It
> might get you out of a hole, but do yourself a favour, reinstall with
> a more normal partition layout and restore from your backups.
>
> (it doesn't need to be the automatic default, but it's at least
> advisable to have separate partitions for /, /usr, /usr/local, /var,
> /home, and probably also /usr/ports if you are building from ports).
I would add /tmp
-Otto
