Re: [linuxiran] Best Partitioning Scheme

[Arash Zeini]

On Monday 29 December 2003 23:00, A. Sajjad Zaidi wrote:

> 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.

Depends a bit on what you want to do. I would never make too many different 
partitions on a normal, day to day desktop system. Changes if we talk 
about a server. But I would always recommend to make a partition for 
/home. That pays off. If /var falls under / you need a bit more space 
there.
And I had forgotten about /swap. I have also a 1 GB swap to share between 
the two distros.
I have a 32MB /boot for both distros and have around 5 different kernels 
there and yet /boot's usage is less than 50%.
How many kernles do you have on a running system, that you need such a big 
/boot?

Arash
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