Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Bob Scofield (scofi...@omsoft.com): > How important is it to have a separate partition for /tmp? I've > got 2G on the desktop I'm using right now. The partition for / is > 15G. I vaguely recall a discussion here years ago and people > saying that /tmp is on a separate partition to prevent / from being > crowded. Eh, 'crowded' as in hitting 100% capacity? There is some small logic to that. But you haven't considered a vital distinction. SSD or hard disk? Some new laptops have one, some the other. The wear characteristics of SSD have improved greatly since early days, but in general you still want to do what you can to avoid excess wear. A /tmp filesystem is by nature pretty write-intensive. One can make an argument that a host with only SSD storage should have no swap filesystem. Then, if it runs out of free RAQ, the kernel OOM (out of memory) process killer will just terminate things as necessary, rather than swapping them out. > Does it make sense to have a 2G /tmp? Consider: If you're considering a laptop with a 2TB hard drive, why _not_ have a 2GZB /tmp filesystem? SSDs are really a radically different (and almost entirely better) proposition, and ideally you should consider carefully how to proceed with them. See for example https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization . On a system with a single hard drive, I pay close attention to filesystem _ordering_ to minimise average seek distance, which means grouping the most-accessed filesystems on either side of the swap filesystem, and the less-accessed filesystems further out from the middle. If the system has mulitple hard drives (that aren't in a RAID set), then additional optimisations are possible. And some attention to filesystem mount options is useful for several reasons. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
What I generally do is make 2 or 3 12-20 GB partitions for root filesystems and allocate the rest as a /work partition. Multiple root partitions give you an easy way to try other distributions or upgrade to new releases without disrupting what you already have. /work is where my personal stuff goes and I'll have various symlinks (mostly from my home directory) to places in there. I don't bother with a separate /tmp. If something uses a lot of space in there I could redirect that to /work as well, but it hasn't come up. Have fun! Rod On 10/05/2017 09:09 PM, Bob Scofield wrote: > I'm thinking about getting a new laptop for myself and a new desktop > for my wife. I know that for these computers I definitely want a > separate partition for /home. > > I notice that on my present Linux machines that I have a separate > partition for /tmp. And of course there are separate partitions for / > and swap. That's all the separate partitions I have. > > How important is it to have a separate partition for /tmp? I've got > 2G on the desktop I'm using right now. The partition for / is 15G. I > vaguely recall a discussion here years ago and people saying that /tmp > is on a separate partition to prevent / from being crowded. Does it > make sense to have a 2G /tmp? Does it make any difference if one does > not have a separate partition for /tmp but instead adds 2G to /? > > Thanks for you help. > > Bob > > ___ > vox-tech mailing list > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
I'm thinking about getting a new laptop for myself and a new desktop for my wife. I know that for these computers I definitely want a separate partition for /home. I notice that on my present Linux machines that I have a separate partition for /tmp. And of course there are separate partitions for / and swap. That's all the separate partitions I have. How important is it to have a separate partition for /tmp? I've got 2G on the desktop I'm using right now. The partition for / is 15G. I vaguely recall a discussion here years ago and people saying that /tmp is on a separate partition to prevent / from being crowded. Does it make sense to have a 2G /tmp? Does it make any difference if one does not have a separate partition for /tmp but instead adds 2G to /? Thanks for you help. Bob ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 06:24:40PM -0700, Ryan wrote: > The problem with that is that it'd be a 2+ hour trip each way for me, so > it's not likely. But... that's what MOST speakers do! ;) Come on, you know you want to jump off THAT cliff! -- -bill! Sent from my computer ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:02:07PM -0700, Brian Lavender brian-at-brie.com |lugod| wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:47:03AM -0700, Ryan wrote: > > [Stuff about LVM] > > Sounds like a good topic for a talk. I don't suppose you would mind > volunteering? The problem with that is that it'd be a 2+ hour trip each way for me, so it's not likely. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Brian Lavender (br...@brie.com): > This is sounding personal. And _that_ is sounding like you're seeking to insert soap opera where it is not present. If you're bored, I can recommend a few hobbies. ;-> Actually, the subject is of professional concern, not personal. I do systems. > Once again, "LVM is king!" Horaay for the king. Long live the king, LVM. And I would never tell you your kink is not OK, Brian. ;-> ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:47:03AM -0700, Ryan wrote: > On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 11:15:04AM -0700, Bob Scofield scofield-at-omsoft.com > |lugod| wrote: > > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not > > like > > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. > > I use and reccomend the following to anyone who is willing to learn it: > > 500MB: /boot > everything else: LVM2 > > under LVM2, create volumes of somewhat conservitive size, and LEAVE FREE > SPACE. > > EG, in your 111GB drive, > /: 20GB > /home: 60GB > > You then may experiance the joy of snapshot, which allow you to create a > copy of a filesystem frozen in time without having to copy anything. > > If you use a filesystem such as XFS that supports online resize, you can > englarge your volumes without intterupting work to shut down. > > the text based ubuntu/debian installers support LVM2 out of the box. Sounds like a good topic for a talk. I don't suppose you would mind volunteering? -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > 3 partitions is IMO quite reasonable, 8 much less so. You're entitled to you opinion, but studying and understanding the system's local nature and needs dictates what makes sense. My current server has about that many data-bearing filesystems arranged across a mirrored RAID1 pair and a separate single drive. Every one of those filesystems has a system-specific reason for existing, and for existing separately from the others. The reasons are various. You can read Karsten's page to read about many and perhaps all. Minimising seek is of course merely one objective (a point we'll return to, briefly, later). > Although I find splitting root and /var kind of strange. Wouldn't > that increase your seeks quite a bit. No, quite the opposite, if you do it right. > Heh, statically greatly extended sounds like more of a WAG[1] to me. Sure > less seeks = less wear, not to mention more perf. However saying that your > drive will die when seek distance = X seems wildly overstated. That and the fact that I'm not an idiot would be why I did _not_ so state. > I suspect there are numbers much more significant factors like temp, > vibration, power on hours, etc. If I were taking the time to brief you about all aspects of system care, I would be telling you primarily about preventing head buildup. > Do you know of any papers correlating seek number and distance > with disk life? No, I am not going to be dredging up research for you. > I read a statical analysis that google published on some > ungodly number of drives that had quite a few surprises in it. Yes, we all read that one. > 2-3 partitions sounds very reasonable. Having to use ln is a pretty big > sacrifice IMO. _Obviously_, it's a get-by measure. Covered separately, as seemingly that wasn't apparent. > At least with a single partition the filesystem tries it's best to keep files > in the same dir a short seek distance away. Karsten had the same problem. > Not that the normal average case doesn't justify 2-3 partitions, but I think > it's rather exceptional to justify 7-8. If you think "minimising seek" was cited as a reason for 7-8 filesystems, then you need to re-read what was posted, as that was not the case. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > Er, right in the bold 3rd paragraph he mentions /boot, he mentioned in in the > why partition paragraph... twice. In fact he mentioned /boot as 4th most > important partition ahead of /tmp, /var, /home, and /usr/local. He mentioned > /boot a dozen or so times, and it's in his examples that he lists. > > So what is factually incorrect again? It's not in his basic recommendation, nor his "How many partitions" list, nor his desktop recommendation. The only example he has it in is "A suggested laptop/desktop configuration" at the end. You're characterisation of "strong on /boot" is obviously wrong -- as will be apparent to anyone who actually reads the page. But, you know, Karsten has already done his best to set you straight. Oddly, there are scenarios where a separate /boot still makes some sense, even on modern hardware where the 1024 logical cylinder BIOS booting limit no longer applies -- but for the most part, that is (as I already said) indeed obsolete. Partitioning needs emerge from the particular situations of specific systems, always. Attentive reading of Karsten's page would have told you he was saying that. If not, his post _here_ calling your attention to that fact should have. ;-> > > And yet a trained monkey can do "df -h" on a similar installed > > system, to guesstimate the target requirement for the system's > > projected life. > > Sure, if you have a similar system like that in production, even then > it seems like a fair number of mistakes are made, like you are Karsten > occasional reinstalls and use the use. And yet, this proves in practice to almost never be a problem. When starting out, you don't get fancy, you observe where space is needed and how much, and it becomes pretty obvious. Observe, learn, apply knowledge gained. This really isn't difficult. > IMO as far as maintenance, robustness, and > sustainability are concerned that many (>= 6) are worse than few (<=4) > partitions are having to resort to ln -s is particularly evil, ruins > performance and makes it harder to maintain the machine. The 11 years of 24x7 service from my server's hard drives (the pair that were killed eventually by a PG&E power spike, this past April) seem incompatible with your assertion about maintenance, robustness, and sustainability. Just as one data point that is handiest to mind. Obviously, you move part of a filesystem and symlink it only as a last-resort move, and you do _not_ do that for performance-sensitive moves, as fortunately most would not be. What you would generally eventually then do, in that last-resort scenario, is rsync-over-ssh the data off to somewhere across a network for safekeeping, blow away the filesystems in question, remake them at the desired size, remount, rsync the data back. That's how we do it in production. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 11:48:37AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > > > Er, right in the bold 3rd paragraph he mentions /boot, he mentioned in in > > the > > why partition paragraph... twice. In fact he mentioned /boot as 4th most > > important partition ahead of /tmp, /var, /home, and /usr/local. He > > mentioned > > /boot a dozen or so times, and it's in his examples that he lists. > > > > So what is factually incorrect again? > > It's not in his basic recommendation, nor his "How many partitions" > list, nor his desktop recommendation. The only example he has it in is > "A suggested laptop/desktop configuration" at the end. You're > characterisation of "strong on /boot" is obviously wrong -- as will be > apparent to anyone who actually reads the page. > > But, you know, Karsten has already done his best to set you straight. This is sounding personal. I am sure that Bill's system will run, whichever method he choose. Why such factually logical steadfastness? Once again, "LVM is king!" Horaay for the king. Long live the king, LVM. brian -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 07:54:49PM -0700, Bill Broadley wrote: > Rick Moen wrote: > > Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > > > >> [...] I think it's a particularly bad idea to as Karsten's page says > >> make the basic recommendation for 6 partitions. If you read his page > >> it looks like he's pretty strong on /boot and swap partitions as well. > > ^ > > > > This is factually incorrect. As Karsten said, you seem to be imputing > > rather than reading. What is the difference between "factually incorrect" and "incorrect"? Or, could it be "logically correct", which would mean a completely different thing? > > Sure, if you have a similar system like that in production, even then it seems > like a fair number of mistakes are made, like you are Karsten occasional > reinstalls and use the use. IMO as far as maintenance, robustness, and > sustainability are concerned that many (>= 6) are worse than few (<=4) > partitions are having to resort to ln -s is particularly evil, ruins > performance and makes it harder to maintain the machine. Why wouldn't you just use lvm to expand your partition and ext2resize to expand it? These tools can be run on a live system. I have done it a __few__ times. When a partition fills up, just add more space to it. > > >> The page also makes a few mentioned of ro, seems a bit silly. So if > >> only root can write to /usr, and root can remount rw what are you > >> protection from? > > > > In short: yourself. It's saved me from shooting myself in the foot > > quite a number of times. Once again, both Karsten and I already > > addressed this point, so your posing the question yet again seems to be > > solely polemics. I thought backups are for when you shoot yourself in the foot. -- Brian Lavender "LVM is king!" http://www.brie.com/brian/ ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > >> [...] I think it's a particularly bad idea to as Karsten's page says >> make the basic recommendation for 6 partitions. If you read his page >> it looks like he's pretty strong on /boot and swap partitions as well. > ^ > > This is factually incorrect. As Karsten said, you seem to be imputing > rather than reading. > Er, right in the bold 3rd paragraph he mentions /boot, he mentioned in in the why partition paragraph... twice. In fact he mentioned /boot as 4th most important partition ahead of /tmp, /var, /home, and /usr/local. He mentioned /boot a dozen or so times, and it's in his examples that he lists. So what is factually incorrect again? >> The flip side is that it requires specialized knowledge (quick, what's >> the optimal /var, /usr, /usr/local for a particular distribution? ) >> that's often basically unknowable. > > And yet a trained monkey can do "df -h" on a similar installed system, > to guesstimate the target requirement for the system's projected life. Sure, if you have a similar system like that in production, even then it seems like a fair number of mistakes are made, like you are Karsten occasional reinstalls and use the use. IMO as far as maintenance, robustness, and sustainability are concerned that many (>= 6) are worse than few (<=4) partitions are having to resort to ln -s is particularly evil, ruins performance and makes it harder to maintain the machine. >> The page also makes a few mentioned of ro, seems a bit silly. So if >> only root can write to /usr, and root can remount rw what are you >> protection from? > > In short: yourself. It's saved me from shooting myself in the foot > quite a number of times. Once again, both Karsten and I already > addressed this point, so your posing the question yet again seems to be > solely polemics. That wasn't my intent, hopefully you can accept sleep deprivation and losing track of all the details instead of malice. >> Sure things like putting /tmp on a ram disk sounds like a great idea, > > Again this was _not_ among Karsten's recommendations. That one is my fault, he said "shm (shared memory) virtual disk", I could have sworn he said ram disk, but when I go back he was clear, correct, and reasonable on this point. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > >> You mean the easy steps where you take a default install with 3 ish >> partitions, then predict the future needs for 7-8 partitions and then tweak >> the journal or lack or, various mount flags, and partitioning ordering to >> minimize seeks? > > Even a half-assed attempt at reducing average seek time/distance is > radically better than none at all. Lowest-hanging fruit in this > case might be something like this: > > o Root partition taking up the first 40% of the drive. > o Swap taking up some reasonable size, in the middle of the drive. > o Var partition taking up the rest. 3 partitions is IMO quite reasonable, 8 much less so. Although I find splitting root and /var kind of strange. Wouldn't that increase your seeks quite a bit. > Anyhow, I spent about twenty minutes originally planning the partition > map of the linuxmafia.com server box that was ultimately destroyed > by a power spike during a severe wind storm this past April -- and then > about eight years running it. You'd suggest I'd have been smarter to be > penny wise and pound foolish by not bothering? Really? As mention that looks quite reasonable. > And, I forgot to mention earlier: It's hardly just performance that > benefits from seek optimisation. Hard drive _life_ will (statistically > speaking) be greatly extended by the greatly reduced wear Heh, statically greatly extended sounds like more of a WAG[1] to me. Sure less seeks = less wear, not to mention more perf. However saying that your drive will die when seek distance = X seems wildly overstated. I suspect there are numbers much more significant factors like temp, vibration, power on hours, etc. Do you know of any papers correlating seek number and distance with disk life? I read a statical analysis that google published on some ungodly number of drives that had quite a few surprises in it. > It's only > one data point, but the two 9GB SCSI2 drives killed by power spike, in > April, had been in continuous service for 11 years. Sounds good, I've never tried to run 9GBs that long, I think I managed 7-8 before I didn't care to pay the power/cooling/time to deal with such small disks. I have several file servers with 16, during their service lives I think I lost 1 or 2. > You know, I _can_ recall having made occasional miscalculations about > filesystem size. Fortunately, I hadn't forgotten how the "ln -s" > command works. ;-> 2-3 partitions sounds very reasonable. Having to use ln is a pretty big sacrifice IMO. It complicates backups and totally destroys any seek locality. At least with a single partition the filesystem tries it's best to keep files in the same dir a short seek distance away. Karsten had the same problem. Not that the normal average case doesn't justify 2-3 partitions, but I think it's rather exceptional to justify 7-8. > (In one case, I actually did make the root filesystem too small, but > that became apparent within about ten minutes of installing the needed > software, so the obvious remedy was to blow it away and do it right.) Sure, some experimentation is needed. I've had similar happen, especially with things that tend to accumulate over time, like a cache of .debs that apt likes to keep around and the like. In many cases quite a bit of time can be saved by not worrying about /var being a bit bigger than expected, tracking which partition to make symbolic links to/from, etc. Especially when you go to adjust the partition sizes only to realize that you already forgot that you make the links so your new numbers are off as well. > ___ > vox-tech mailing list > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:39:58AM -0700, Gabriel G. Rosa wrote: > > I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely > irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM. You can argue it's not a lot > of extra work to set up, but it's also not a lot of gains to be had > over time. > My Dell Mini 9 has no swap with its 2 Gigs of RAM. But, the Solid State Drive (SSD) sure does work great! You can always add swap on the fly for when you want your system to appear to have more memory. To create a 1GB file, type (root not required): $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576 Prepare the swap file using mkswap just as you would a partition, but this time use the name of the swap file: $ mkswap /swapfile Enable it. Now you have to be root. # swapon /swapfile But, on 32 bit, the max will be 4 Gigs (Maybe 2) unless you have PAE. Of course someone is going to point out some bank switching technique I was not aware of. I don't know if you saw, but Dell stopped production of the Mini 9. Now, it's the Vostro A90. I think the Mini 9 will certainly be one of the great Netbooks recorded in history. Dell/Canonical really smoked it! brian -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:27:06AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > > Ironically for your comment (above), Karsten _does_ mention LVM in a > laudatory fashion, as an option -- though he doesn't employ it in his > examples. "laudatory fashion" LVM is king. Although, I put together a system without it because the backup program I was using at the time, BackupEdge, would not restore LVM. -- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/ ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
You guys sure know how to beat a dead horse. - Original Message - From: "Karsten M. Self" To: Sent: Friday, June 19, 2009 4:36 PM Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice > ___ > vox-tech mailing list > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech > ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Turns out I'm still subscribed - nomail - to vox-tech ;-) on Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:39:58AM -0700, Gabriel G. Rosa (gr...@ucdavis.edu) wrote: > On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:27:06AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > I find the argument of journal overhead to be about as relevant in a > modern machine as the argument of software RAID overhead. That is to say, > not at all. Journals: - Take up space on disk. Not much but below about 1GB it becomes large relative to the storage area. - More significantly: are updated on every file write operation. Toss in some performance bugs and you're increasing the number of writes (and seeks) necessary for basic activity. On high-activity filesystems (/tmp, /var/spool, /scratch) this can be more than a passing concern. As with noatime and nosync, selecting a non-journaled filesystem may offer performance advantages. Rule of thumb: if you don't care whether or not your data's there at next boot, don't use a journaled filesystem. /tmp tends to meet that criterion. Doubly so as FHS specifically defines /tmp as not guaranteeing persistance across boots. Handily enforced by using tmpfs. > > Multiple swap partitions per _spindle_, as mentioned in part of > > Karsten's page, is indeed old hat. On the other hand, having multiple > > swap partitions of the one-per-spindle variety is just common sense, as > > it improves performance considerably. > > I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely > irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM. You can argue it's not a lot > of extra work to set up, but it's also not a lot of gains to be had > over time. I'll point one last time at Martin Pool's essay. Swap partitions on multiple spindles are AFAIK automatically striped by the kernel for optimal performance. If you've spent any time watching system performance, you'll find that waiting for heads to seek and settle chews up an impressive amount of time. Even on "simple" desktop systems (perhaps moreso as task load is highly variable and perceived subjective responsiveness important). Swap doesn't make your box slow, swapping does. Which indicates either insufficient RAM, poorly written code, or both. > > Anyhow, I'd feel a prize chump if I had my server set up as > > single-filesystem plus swap on quite a few grounds, including > > performance: Being able to put the swap in the middle of the > > spindle, and the most-visited portions of the file tree on either > > side, is a huge win for keeping average seek time low. I'd be > > bloody incompetent if I _didn't_ do that. > > Until your storage is all solid state and seek times become > meaningless. Some of us (although not me yet) are already there. I don't see that as being cost-effective in all cases for some time, though it's likely true for portable devices within the next five years, as well as most lower-end consumer desktops. Server storage requirements will still require spinning spindles and seeking heads for a while to come if only for cost and space reasons. My own speculation is that SSD front-ending will be used to greatly accelerate caching on most devices, which should improve performance markedly. As Andrew Morton says: "solid-state disks are going to put a lot of code out of a job." http://lwn.net/Articles/275087/ Peace. -- Karsten M. Self http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten Ceterum censeo, Caldera delenda est. signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Forwarding back. - Forwarded message from "Karsten M. Self" - Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:08:53 -0700 From: "Karsten M. Self" To: Rick Moen Subject: Re: (forw) Re: [vox-tech] (forw) Re: (forw) Re: Need Partitioning Advice Bill Broadley wrote: > > I also make a point of noting that there's nothing particularly "wrong" > > with the One Big Partition school (though root plus swap is still > > generally recommended). > > You say that here, 3 partitions in the actual document says different. Um. I said: One large system partition. A boot partition (strictly optional), a swap partition (strictly optional), and the system root filesystem. Isolating boot offers a few benefits (mostly dealing with flaky BIOSes and bootloaders). Swap partitions are IMO cleaner. Given historical partitioning schemes, it's pretty bloody simple. Among the reasons I wrote the document under discussion was to avoid discussions such as this. The author means to be helpful but is a busy and testy chap. Incidentally, your initial partitioning concept (/, /home, and swap) is perfectly serviceable. For Debian or Ubuntu, 10-15GB for root should be ample. Or just do / and swap. When I said: "there's no specific need", I mean that literally. The Linux partitioning gestapo are not going to repeal your GPL and eat your children because you've partitioned a particular way, though you may, in the course of events and storage accidents, discover some of the benefits of a more nuanced scheme. > > *** IN BOLD TEXT!!! *** > > > > *** IN THE THIRD PARAGRAPH OF THE FAQ *** > > > > I guess you can't please 'em all. > > You sound much more reasonable in your above statements then you do in the > document. ... I am deeply disturbed when *** STARRED TRIPLE BANG ALL CAPS *** is read as more reasonable than measured and informed advice > In this mentioned "THIRD PARAGRAPH OF THE FAQ" still in bold you admit > the increasingly popularity of "minimal partitioning" which you go on > to explain actually means 5 partitions. Um. I think I'll just stop here. Because that is factually incorrect to a degree that seems as if it might be willful. Have a nice day. -- Karsten M. Self http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten Ceterum censeo, Caldera delenda est. - End forwarded message - ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > [...] I think it's a particularly bad idea to as Karsten's page says > make the basic recommendation for 6 partitions. If you read his page > it looks like he's pretty strong on /boot and swap partitions as well. ^ This is factually incorrect. As Karsten said, you seem to be imputing rather than reading. [skipping most:] > The flip side is that it requires specialized knowledge (quick, what's > the optimal /var, /usr, /usr/local for a particular distribution? ) > that's often basically unknowable. And yet a trained monkey can do "df -h" on a similar installed system, to guesstimate the target requirement for the system's projected life. > So what use case adds security by using noexec if /tmp is world > readable and mounted with exec? Karsten answered this question, as did I -- and neither of us indulged the overinflated expectations that the phrase "add security" (your phrase) tends to introduce into a conversation. > The page also makes a few mentioned of ro, seems a bit silly. So if > only root can write to /usr, and root can remount rw what are you > protection from? In short: yourself. It's saved me from shooting myself in the foot quite a number of times. Once again, both Karsten and I already addressed this point, so your posing the question yet again seems to be solely polemics. > Sure things like putting /tmp on a ram disk sounds like a great idea, Again this was _not_ among Karsten's recommendations. > > You'd rather provide an explicit and laundry list of directories (that > > must then be maintained), when just adding "-x" (don't cross filesystem > > boundaries) to your rsync command solves that problem entirely? Really? > > Er, yes. Good luck with that. I think my point is self-explanatory. > In any case, by crude partition based backups I meant things like dump > restore vs [...] More straw-man argumentation, as Karsten made no such recommendation. I really will skip the rest. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > You mean the easy steps where you take a default install with 3 ish > partitions, then predict the future needs for 7-8 partitions and then tweak > the journal or lack or, various mount flags, and partitioning ordering to > minimize seeks? Even a half-assed attempt at reducing average seek time/distance is radically better than none at all. Lowest-hanging fruit in this case might be something like this: o Root partition taking up the first 40% of the drive. o Swap taking up some reasonable size, in the middle of the drive. o Var partition taking up the rest. Anyhow, I spent about twenty minutes originally planning the partition map of the linuxmafia.com server box that was ultimately destroyed by a power spike during a severe wind storm this past April -- and then about eight years running it. You'd suggest I'd have been smarter to be penny wise and pound foolish by not bothering? Really? And, I forgot to mention earlier: It's hardly just performance that benefits from seek optimisation. Hard drive _life_ will (statistically speaking) be greatly extended by the greatly reduced wear: It's only one data point, but the two 9GB SCSI2 drives killed by power spike, in April, had been in continuous service for 11 years. > That's not _easy_ in my book, especially since the very act of doing > so makes it more likely that additional tweaks will be needed in the > future. You know, I _can_ recall having made occasional miscalculations about filesystem size. Fortunately, I hadn't forgotten how the "ln -s" command works. ;-> (In one case, I actually did make the root filesystem too small, but that became apparent within about ten minutes of installing the needed software, so the obvious remedy was to blow it away and do it right.) ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Gabriel G. Rosa (gr...@ucdavis.edu): > >> Note that the OP was talking about his wife's desktop system, not high >> performance servers. > > Note that this mailing list includes subscribers, and subscribers' > concerns, other than the OP. ;-> > > (I don't know about you, but I take at least all of the _easy_ steps to > make all of my machines be high-performance ones.) *chuckle* You mean the easy steps where you take a default install with 3 ish partitions, then predict the future needs for 7-8 partitions and then tweak the journal or lack or, various mount flags, and partitioning ordering to minimize seeks? That's not _easy_ in my book, especially since the very act of doing so makes it more likely that additional tweaks will be needed in the future. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
While I realize this is a religious issue and everyone has their own idea I think it's a particularly bad idea to as Karsten's page says make the basic recommendation for 6 partitions. If you read his page it looks like he's pretty strong on /boot and swap partitions as well. So yes I think a basic recommendation for 8 partitions is insane. You just end up with a labor intensive fragile system that requires a substantial amount of specialized knowledge to create and is rather sensitive to any future changes to the system. First let me say that for any particular use that a there can be a small gain by using small partitions. Say putting of of the 8 partitions on the fastest part of the disk, or skipping a journal, mounting read only, etc. No argument for a particular metric you can make a difference. The flip side is that it requires specialized knowledge (quick, what's the optimal /var, /usr, /usr/local for a particular distribution? ) that's often basically unknowable. Can you really guess how many packages you are going to install in /usr/local in the next 3 years? Can you really afford to periodically "spend a day rationalizing your partition sizes?". What actual real world benefit justifies losing a man day periodically? Did you notice that even after the "day of rationalization" he still had to make symlinks between partitions to handle overflow? Sure when Unix boxes were hugely expensive, CPU cycles are precious commodities, OS's were primitive, disks hugely expensive, security was terrible (plain text passwords, buffer overflows, no selinux/apparmor, commonly all network services ran as root, rare use of jails/chroot, no stack protection, no NX bit, etc. etc. etc.) that sysadmin time was cheap in comparison to the gains. Even small gains were worth spending man hours on. These days disk are cheap, ram is cheap, security is way better, buffer overflows are getting rarer, network services are usually setup pretty reasonably by default. Sure mounting as noexec can help... unless of course apparmor or selinux already made a profile dramatically more restrictive already. So you could spend time tuning which flags for each of the 8 partitions of course you might well make a mistake like Karsten did and leave exec on for /tmp. So what use case adds security by using noexec if /tmp is world readable and mounted with exec? Using 8 partitions causes more complexity requires more optimization in a never ending circle. Oh the humanity... just imagine how much space you would save by deleting those unneeded hugely inefficient journals. Never mind it's the 8 partitions themselves that creates the need for 7 journals. Ignore that various distributions, kernel developers, and the author claim that it helps availability, data integrity, and speed. Sure journals are sometimes slower and they actually take some small amount of disk space but if they save even a single user file that would have been lost with EXT2 that it's worth it. IMO the distributions do a pretty good job of the defaults, (like using just a few partitions) you really shouldn't ignore their defaults without a good reason. Sure there are special cases that justify all kinds of weird configurations I wouldn't start with 8 partitions as a default basic recommendation. If you are really I/O limited there's many things to tune before you start looking at partition sizes. The page also makes a few mentioned of ro, seems a bit silly. So if only root can write to /usr, and root can remount rw what are you protection from? Sure you might prevent a silly user mistake... a tangible benefit. unless of course it causes the sysadmin to delay patching because of the extra hoops of remount instead of the simple apt-get update/upgrade (or clicking on a icon if you like GUIs). A single delayed patch might well cost more than you could ever save with such optimizations 100x over. Sure things like putting /tmp on a ram disk sounds like a great idea, especially if you don't really understand the buffer cache. It should be really fast right, after all ram is fast... right? Well as it turns out the buffer cache works really well on anything that would fit in a ramdisk. Additionally when you aren't I/O intensive that ram could be useful elsewhere. Even if it was 1000x faster I suspect most workloads are not I/O limited by /tmp anyways. Not to mention having /tmp survive a reboot might just save you 10 minutes retyping the document you are working on before a power outage. Would it really be so awful if I could cd /tmp and untar the linux kernel source tree so I could look at it and then not have to worry about forgetting to delete it? With Karsten's recommended config you would start the download then after waiting realize that /tmp is full. Sure you could cd ~, then retry. Of course then as you get distracted after pouring over the source now you have 400MB (assuming you didn't build it) wasted in your home directory
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Gabriel G. Rosa (gr...@ucdavis.edu): > Note that the OP was talking about his wife's desktop system, not high > performance servers. Note that this mailing list includes subscribers, and subscribers' concerns, other than the OP. ;-> (I don't know about you, but I take at least all of the _easy_ steps to make all of my machines be high-performance ones.) ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 12:09:00PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Gabriel G. Rosa (gr...@ucdavis.edu): > > > I find the argument of journal overhead to be about as relevant in a > > modern machine as the argument of software RAID overhead. That is to say, > > not at all. > > This line of thought isn't going to fly among system administrators, at > least. ext2 has always been really valuable as a really fast operating > system, ext3, even used with well selected journal options, is merely > very good. In situations where performance matters -- and where a > journal is not essential -- the choice matters. > > And even on my own servers, which are fundamentally bottlnecked on > outbound bandwidth rather than disk, I'd rather not lose easy > performance gains. > > > I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely > > irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM. > > Again, this is not a compelling argument for sysadmins, or anyone else > who takes pride in getting easy gains of performance where they are > available. > > > You can argue it's not a lot of extra work to set up, but it's also > > not a lot of gains to be had over time. > > You have probably not seen systems thrashing for lack of it. > Note that the OP was talking about his wife's desktop system, not high performance servers. -G ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Gabriel G. Rosa (gr...@ucdavis.edu): > I find the argument of journal overhead to be about as relevant in a > modern machine as the argument of software RAID overhead. That is to say, > not at all. This line of thought isn't going to fly among system administrators, at least. ext2 has always been really valuable as a really fast operating system, ext3, even used with well selected journal options, is merely very good. In situations where performance matters -- and where a journal is not essential -- the choice matters. And even on my own servers, which are fundamentally bottlnecked on outbound bandwidth rather than disk, I'd rather not lose easy performance gains. > That is odd indeed ;) > > Can you elaborate a bit on this? Multiple extra layers of abstraction that don't, IMO, sufficiently repay that added complexity. Instead of just dealing in filesystems and their device names, you have a volume group on top of a partition, and a logical volume on top of that. More layers in the middle of your system to understand and manage (including device-mapper), and more to go wrong. Yes, you get LVM2 snapshots. I don't personally find that compelling enough. Your Mileage May Differ. > I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely > irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM. Again, this is not a compelling argument for sysadmins, or anyone else who takes pride in getting easy gains of performance where they are available. > You can argue it's not a lot of extra work to set up, but it's also > not a lot of gains to be had over time. You have probably not seen systems thrashing for lack of it. > Until your storage is all solid state and seek times become > meaningless. Some of us (although not me yet) are already there. Indeed, one way to eliminate the need for competence at seek-optimisation is to eliminate seeking. ;-> ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:27:06AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > Consider /usr on a server where that is kept mounted read-only except > during installation/removal of packages. Why have the overhead of a > journal? > > Consider also a /tmp filesystem where you want high performance, and for > some reason don't want to use tmpfs. (Maybe you prefer /tmp to be > persistent between reboots.) Again, why do you want the overhead of a > journal on _/tmp_? > I find the argument of journal overhead to be about as relevant in a modern machine as the argument of software RAID overhead. That is to say, not at all. > > * The lack of online resizing and logical volumes > > Oddly, some of us don't like LVM/LVM2 on account of the avoidable > complexity those add to a system's architecture, and would rather not > trust our files to online resizing. > That is odd indeed ;) Can you elaborate a bit on this? > > * Multiple swap partitions because of limitations on swap size partitions. > > Multiple swap partitions per _spindle_, as mentioned in part of > Karsten's page, is indeed old hat. On the other hand, having multiple > swap partitions of the one-per-spindle variety is just common sense, as > it improves performance considerably. > I think Bill's point is that swap spindle optimization is become largely irrelevant with cheap and abundant RAM. You can argue it's not a lot of extra work to set up, but it's also not a lot of gains to be had over time. > Anyhow, I'd feel a prize chump if I had my server set up as > single-filesystem plus swap on quite a few grounds, including > performance: Being able to put the swap in the middle of the spindle, > and the most-visited portions of the file tree on either side, is a huge > win for keeping average seek time low. I'd be bloody incompetent if I > _didn't_ do that. Until your storage is all solid state and seek times become meaningless. Some of us (although not me yet) are already there. -G ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Bill Broadley (b...@cse.ucdavis.edu): > While this is a rather personal preference, many of the ideas that led to the > 5-6 partitions as standard operating procedure are gone. Some of those ideas > that are no longer true: > * file systems that didn't scale to large sizes well I can't find anywhere in Karsten's document where he says anything about Linux filesystem scaling problems, let alone those being a factor in partitioning. Can you please point it out? (It's possible you weren't thinking of Karsten's page, in that particular, but were just citing obsolete concerns generally.) > * lack of journals that lead to long fsck times Only if you mount rw by default, and only on filesystems of significant size and complexity. Consider /usr on a server where that is kept mounted read-only except during installation/removal of packages. Why have the overhead of a journal? Consider also a /tmp filesystem where you want high performance, and for some reason don't want to use tmpfs. (Maybe you prefer /tmp to be persistent between reboots.) Again, why do you want the overhead of a journal on _/tmp_? The example of /usr will not lead to long fsck times because it's synced at all times (except rare occasions when you remount it rw for package operations). The example of /tmp doesn't lead to long fsck times because, well, it's /tmp -- isn't huge, doesn't have large amounts of stuff in it. > * Rare/expensive unix systems that ran tons of services and had > shells for users. Which required protecting services from users > and vice versa. Actually, protecting the system from misbehaving processes, and the system from the sysadmin, and the system from poor recoverability, are rather more the point. So, for example, the more the root filesystem is isolated by having non-essential things be in separate filessytems, the more likely you will be able to mount / at boot time despite problems that may have arisen in, say, /usr or /var. There's a really good reason why system recovery/restore/repair tools are all in /bin and /sbin: That's so they'll not be unavailable if /usr is temporarily hosed and cannot be mounted. Why else do you think those and /usr/bin / /usr/sbin aren't simply merged for simplicity's sake? > * Crude partition based backups You'd rather provide an explicit and laundry list of directories (that must then be maintained), when just adding "-x" (don't cross filesystem boundaries) to your rsync command solves that problem entirely? Really? > * The lack of online resizing and logical volumes Oddly, some of us don't like LVM/LVM2 on account of the avoidable complexity those add to a system's architecture, and would rather not trust our files to online resizing. Ironically for your comment (above), Karsten _does_ mention LVM in a laudatory fashion, as an option -- though he doesn't employ it in his examples. > * Multiple swap partitions because of limitations on swap size partitions. Multiple swap partitions per _spindle_, as mentioned in part of Karsten's page, is indeed old hat. On the other hand, having multiple swap partitions of the one-per-spindle variety is just common sense, as it improves performance considerably. > * Horrifyingly poor security defaults Can you be a few orders of magnitude more specific? Defaults of noexec or nosuid on some portions of the tree, e.g., were of course not intended to deter anyone who's already cracked root, but could prevent both canned attacks from succeeding (if, say, you've been caught napping by yet another developed PHP app hole) and can help avoid sysadmin mishap. Anyhow, Karsten's document wasn't about tips to deal with security issues. Are you asserting that his recommended partitioning strategy _hurts_ security? If so, in which particulars? > * ram was so expensive you usually didn't have enough to reasonably buffer Oddly enough, my server had a mere 256 MB until this April, not because RAM was expensive, but rather because I didn't want to sink _any_ more money into a box that was going away, and the migration to the replacement box kept being deferred. But anyway, regardless of how much RAM I have on my servers (and the upgrade to the newer machine with 1.5 GB was a big relief, thanks), it's a point of pride not to waste it. I have work for it to do. > * file systems that often resulted in poor locality, so partitions were > used to keep the head more local when processing a news spool or the like. Guess what? NFS hasn't gone away. Nor SMB. > * Installing 2 or more OSs on a single machine was rare. This seems irrelevant: Although Karsten's page doesn't address that case explicitly, I can't see that his recommendations wouldn't apply there, pretty much the same. Anyway, dealing with multiple OSes per machine through partitioning seems quaint, to me, since the development of good VM technology. My experience was always that people thinking they were going to boot back and forth between OSes were k
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 11:15:04AM -0700, Bob Scofield scofield-at-omsoft.com |lugod| wrote: > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. I use and reccomend the following to anyone who is willing to learn it: 500MB: /boot everything else: LVM2 under LVM2, create volumes of somewhat conservitive size, and LEAVE FREE SPACE. EG, in your 111GB drive, /: 20GB /home: 60GB You then may experiance the joy of snapshot, which allow you to create a copy of a filesystem frozen in time without having to copy anything. If you use a filesystem such as XFS that supports online resize, you can englarge your volumes without intterupting work to shut down. the text based ubuntu/debian installers support LVM2 out of the box. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Gandalf Parker wrote: > Kindof along the same line and for many of the same reasons I never order a > machine, desktop or server, that doesnt come with at least 2 hard drives. At > minimum level I do compressed file backups to the other drive. Its just basic > avoid all-eggs-in-one-basket thinking. (yes there are many levels above that, > this is minimum) > Indeed, unless you have other backups at home I recommend two distinct drives instead of a RAID-1. RAID-1 is mostly about uptime (survive a disk failure), but doesn't against a mistaken deletion. Since the home machine can usually withstand a reboot a year often the protection against deletion and the potential for having several versions of a heavily edited file is well worth skipping the RAID. > Gandalf Parker > ___ > vox-tech mailing list > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Kindof along the same line and for many of the same reasons I never order a machine, desktop or server, that doesnt come with at least 2 hard drives. At minimum level I do compressed file backups to the other drive. Its just basic avoid all-eggs-in-one-basket thinking. (yes there are many levels above that, this is minimum) Gandalf Parker ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Tim Riley (timri...@appahost.com): > >> thereby making partitioning decisions a thing of the past. > > Ha-ha! > http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Linux/FAQs/partition.html Heh, yeah looks like the past to me, it was written in 2000 and shows it. While this is a rather personal preference, many of the ideas that led to the 5-6 partitions as standard operating procedure are gone. Some of those ideas that are no longer true: * file systems that didn't scale to large sizes well * lack of journals that lead to long fsck times * Rare/expensive unix systems that ran tons of services and had shells for users. Which required protecting services from users and vice versa. * Crude partition based backups * The lack of online resizing and logical volumes * Multiple swap partitions because of limitations on swap size partitions. * Horrifyingly poor security defaults * ram was so expensive you usually didn't have enough to reasonably buffer * file systems that often resulted in poor locality, so partitions were used to keep the head more local when processing a news spool or the like. * Installing 2 or more OSs on a single machine was rare. * the lack of device, pty, /proc, tmpfs and other related virtual or temporary filesystems that help offload the duties and security privs required of a filesystem. In today's world I'd recommend: * If you have a critical service don't run it on a machine with shell users on it. For a mail server keep the account info in the mail system, don't give users shell accounts on the same machine. Replace /var/spool/mail with imap. Use a VM if you have to. Besides local users can DoS you even with different partitions. * Only make a /boot if your / is something that's hard to boot, exotic file systems, RAID 5, LVM, etc. Otherwise skip it. * Swap justifies a partition, I don't really track how much I use, when a 1000GB costs $90 for 3 years I don't quibble over 1/2 ram vs same as ram. BTW, lagging because of swap is more about the rate of swapping than the amount you are using. * While most distributions are pretty good at upgrades, if you have directories that you want to survive the upgrade put them all in a single partition. Popular candidates for this are /opt or /home. * if the machine has a single dedicate purpose put that on a partition, /mirror for a webserver serving as a mirror, /mail for a mail server or related, and /share for a file server. Thus everything dedicated to that single purpose is in a single place, and when you want to reinstall you can just preserve that partition and resize as necessary. * If at all possible avoid extended partitions, they can complicate things as the names change when you change things. For instance on a default ubuntu box: tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) varrun on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) varlock on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777) udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) lrm on /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw,mode=755) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620) fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) rpc_pipefs on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw) nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) All without a single partition ;-). Sure 6 partitions will work fine, it just tends to make more busy work, complicated partition tables, fstabs, the risk of one of your 6 slices being too small, god forbid you install a 2nd OS and need 6 more partitions or need to rebuild your partition table from scratch. For that reason I recommend nice big round numbers when creating partition tables. Like say a 300GB disk with 2GB for swap, 10% for /, and the rest for /home. Even combining /home with / isn't so bad, it does make a complete reinstall either trickier or riskier. Oh, btw, seems pretty common these days to wipe /tmp on boot, even if you don't use tmpfs. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 11:15 -0700, Bob Scofield wrote: > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. > > I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for: > > / > /home > swap > > My wife has 2GB of RAM, and I was thinking of making swap 4GB. I would be inclined towards *very* little swap, perhaps 1GB max no matter how excessively large your RAM is. (Do use less than 1GB if you have less RAM though.) My rationale is that by the time I get to 1GB of RAM swapped out to disk, the whole computer has gotten so slow and unworkable that at that point I'd really prefer to have the out-of-memory process killer give me back control of my machine. (And the OOM process killer can do so far more easily than I can start an X term, find a PID and run `kill`) I haven't actually done as little as 1GB yet, but my workstation has 4GB of RAM and 2 GB of swap and works fine. (I don't think it's ever stored anything in the swap space since I bought it, but I've only owned it for about a month now.) (Note that if you want suspend to disk, you will need at least as much swap as you have RAM to store the RAM image over the reboot.) --Ken -- signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Rod Roark (r...@sunsetsystems.com): > I don't understand why you think any of this is related to my post. Actually it was just a tip, that your mention of /opt prompted me to remember: It gets /opt off the root filesystem (assuming one has either a /usr or a /usr/local one). Which is, IMVAO, A Good Thing -- and, also, in my view, puts /opt contents into a bin having pretty much the same purpose rationale. > FWIW, by default Ubuntu does not use tmpfs for /tmp, and I would not > want it to. I've rather warmed to it, myself. Seems to hit the sweet spot on disk allocation and intelligent use of swap, and on /tmp performance, more often than not. The main thing, in my experience, is that you have to be OK with /tmp no longer being persistent over restarts -- which is an individual thing. In any event, it seemed, like the /opt tip (and like Karsten Self's views and reasons for partitioning recommendations) worth posting to the thread for collective knowledge purposes. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Rod Roark (r...@sunsetsystems.com): > >> /tmp is separate for a few reasons. > > Like being unaware of tmpfs? ;-> > >> I created /opt instead of /home > > :r! ls -l /opt > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-03-04 19:58 /opt -> /usr/local/opt > > (My opinion; yours for a small fee and waiver of reverse-engineering > rights.) I don't understand why you think any of this is related to my post. FWIW, by default Ubuntu does not use tmpfs for /tmp, and I would not want it to. Rod ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Bob Scofield wrote: > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. > > I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for: > > / > /home > swap > > My wife has 2GB of RAM, and I was thinking of making swap 4GB. > > My first question is how big should / be? On my desktop it's 8GB, and on my > laptop it's 13GB. I'm not anywhere near using up the space on either of > those machines. How about 13GB? > > I notice that my desktop has a separate partition for /tmp. Should I create > a > separate /tmp partition for my wife? If so, how big should it be? > > Is there any special difficulty in creating a dual boot system with Vista? > > Thank you. > > Bob Bob, The current recommendations we give people at the Installfests are 10-20GB for / (This depends a bit on types of uses and which distro - I recently noted that Ubuntu needs at minimum 1GB of free space to do an in place upgrade- technically wherever the apt cache is.) 1.1-2x RAM for Swap Everything Else /home Since your wife is not a "power user" most of the reasons for a separate /tmp, /opt, /whatever just add unnecessary complication. The only snag we've seen with Vista happened this last installfest where it would only let us shrink a 200GB of free space by 10GB. We tried to do some defrag magic based on some online tips and ended up making it worse where we couldn't downsize Vista at all (System files stuck at the back of the partition) and resorted to the Ubuntu Wubi installer as the only feasible workaround. A $ copy of a current version of Partition Magic or similar product may alleviate this issue. Alex ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Rod Roark (r...@sunsetsystems.com): > /tmp is separate for a few reasons. Like being unaware of tmpfs? ;-> > I created /opt instead of /home :r! ls -l /opt lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-03-04 19:58 /opt -> /usr/local/opt (My opinion; yours for a small fee and waiver of reverse-engineering rights.) ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Quoting Tim Riley (timri...@appahost.com): > thereby making partitioning decisions a thing of the past. Ha-ha! http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Linux/FAQs/partition.html ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 11:15 -0700, Bob Scofield wrote: > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. > > I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for: > > / > /home > swap I don't ever recall executing the "top" command and seeing any swap space being used. So, I would lean towards the lower values. Also, it used to be that if the root file-system filled up, UNIX wouldn't boot. You would have to boot the rescue tape onto the swap partition, then mount the root file-system and "find" and "rm" the big file(s) that probably caused root to fill up. Only then could you boot. That's why (I believe) you had to partition /tmp, /var/, /usr, etc. So, if any of them filled up, root would be spared. However, now Linux does a clean up of /tmp and probably other directories to enable it to boot if the root file system filled up, thereby making partitioning decisions a thing of the past. > > Is there any special difficulty in creating a dual boot system with Vista? Visit http://apcmag.com/howto_home.htm . There you'll find clear instructions and screen dumps showing you how to build a dual-boot. > > Thank you. > > Bob > ___ > vox-tech mailing list > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
What I did with my new Eee PC (160GB hard drive) was to create an 8GB root partition, 8GB for /tmp, 2GB for swap, and the rest for /opt (except for Win98 and a couple of OEM partitons that I wanted to leave there). /home is a symbolic link pointing to /opt/home. /tmp is separate for a few reasons. One, if it fills up the system will still run. Two, there's never a need to back it up. Three, when I want to upgrade or switch to another distribution, I can re-purpose /tmp as the new root filesystem, and still have the old one available until the new one is fully configured and functional. I created /opt instead of /home because there are some things I want to preserve on an OS upgrade in addition to stuff in /home. My Ubuntu root partition is currently 43% full, so I'm happy with the choice of 8GB. Rod Bob Scofield wrote: > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. > > I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for: > > / > /home > swap > > My wife has 2GB of RAM, and I was thinking of making swap 4GB. > > My first question is how big should / be? On my desktop it's 8GB, and on my > laptop it's 13GB. I'm not anywhere near using up the space on either of > those machines. How about 13GB? > > I notice that my desktop has a separate partition for /tmp. Should I create > a > separate /tmp partition for my wife? If so, how big should it be? > > Is there any special difficulty in creating a dual boot system with Vista? > > Thank you. > > Bob ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
Hey Bob you'll probably get lots of different responses, but my two cents are: 2GB swap 20GB / everything else /home Scott On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 11:15, Bob Scofield wrote: > I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like > Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. > > I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for: > > / > /home > swap > > My wife has 2GB of RAM, and I was thinking of making swap 4GB. > > My first question is how big should / be? On my desktop it's 8GB, and on my > laptop it's 13GB. I'm not anywhere near using up the space on either of > those machines. How about 13GB? > > I notice that my desktop has a separate partition for /tmp. Should I create a > separate /tmp partition for my wife? If so, how big should it be? > > Is there any special difficulty in creating a dual boot system with Vista? > > Thank you. > > Bob > ___ > vox-tech mailing list > vox-tech@lists.lugod.org > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech > ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice
I'm planning to install Linux on my wife's computer because she does not like Vista. I'm going to create a dual boot and will have 111GB for Linux. I am thinking of a simple partitioning system with separate partitions for: / /home swap My wife has 2GB of RAM, and I was thinking of making swap 4GB. My first question is how big should / be? On my desktop it's 8GB, and on my laptop it's 13GB. I'm not anywhere near using up the space on either of those machines. How about 13GB? I notice that my desktop has a separate partition for /tmp. Should I create a separate /tmp partition for my wife? If so, how big should it be? Is there any special difficulty in creating a dual boot system with Vista? Thank you. Bob ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
