Re: [linuxiran] Best Partitioning Scheme

[A. Sajjad Zaidi]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 01:48:02PM -0800, Arash Zeini wrote:
> 
> On times I used to have three different distros on one laptop, but now I 
> have two and use a scheme like this:

One thing that I actually tested for partitioning was the performance of
different areas of the disk. Partitions at the beginning had data
transfer rates upto 2x those at the end. Following this, it makes sense
to put swap and often used data at the beginning.

> /boot: 32 MB

That might be a bit less if you plan on playing around with kernels. I
usually give /boot about 70MB.

> /: 5 GB

I rarely give / more than 3-400MB. The reason is that if something goes
wrong and starts filling up your disk space, / is not the place you want
inaccessable.

Here is what I would usually do with a 40GB disk on a desktop system with
256MB RAM and 2 distros:

/boot:  70MB
/boot:  70MB (2nd distro)
<swap>: 1GB (shared)
/:      400MB
/:      400MB (2nd distro)
/tmp:   512MB
/tmp:   512MB (2nd distro)
/var:   1GB
/var:   1GB (2nd distro)
/usr:   7GB (mounted readonly)
/usr:   7GB (2nd distro) (mounted readonly)
/home:  10GB
/home:  10GB (2nd distro)

Looks a bit cluttered, but there are quite a lot of advantages of
separating the partitions. Some, like /var and /tmp change very often
and have a higher chance of file system corruption. And certain
exploits, such as those for hard-links, don't work across partitions.

By separating them, you can minimize issues like this, though you do end
up wasting some space.

Hope that helps.

-- 
A. Sajjad Zaidi
Sr.System Administrator
iinix Solutions (http://www.iinix.com/)
GnuPG Key ID: 0xD7AD0E13
"Bugs that go away by themselves tend to come back by themselves."