Partitioning

Xi0N · 2008-12-29 00:05:45

I commented this subject in another thread, but as i think is a bit off topic, i prefer to start a new one asking for adice on partitioning.

Until now, my HDD setup is as follows:

Master / ext3 8 Gb
Logical swap 768 Mb (I dont know if this amount is ok, in a 1 Gb RAM laptop in which i virtualize with virtualbox)
Logical /home ext3 100 Gb

But i was yhinking in making something like this:

Master? /boot ext2? 50Mb?
Master / ext4 12Gb
Logical swap 768 Mb
Logical /home ext4 100Gb (The rest of the disk)

Im thinking about how i will configure my partitions for when they release a new arch install image and we can use ext4 from the install itself, moment in which i will reorganize my partitions, and this time, i want to configure them as best as i can. Separating the /boot partition is something i will do for sure.... but i want to have more oppinions about the subject....

Thanks!!!

dolby · 2008-12-29 00:17:11

You need more swap if you want to be able to suspend to disk.
Seperate boot only if you want to use LVM, encryption, or RAID

Last edited by dolby (2008-12-29 00:18:20)

Xi0N · 2008-12-29 00:20:55

What do you call 'more swap' ?

xaiviax · 2008-12-29 01:05:09

You need "slightly more" swap than ram to suspend to disk. Otherwise, you don't.

Arm-the-Homeless · 2008-12-29 01:14:12

Somewhat related to this, since with 2.6.28, I plan on reinstalling using ext4 partitions (I mean wiping the HD and starting from scratch)

How can I back up the configuration files that I'd need to keep?

Such as list of pacman installed, good place to backup files (I have 100 DVDs, it might be 98) and etc.

weasel8 · 2008-12-29 01:22:28

Arm-the-Homeless wrote:

How can I back up the configuration files that I'd need to keep?

Er...just the way you'd back up any other files. Email them to yourself, burn them to a disc, put them on a USB stick, post them on dotfiles.org, put them in online storage. Pick one. When you're in the new install you can use the old configs to overwrite the new ones. As for a list of Pacman's installed packages, I'd go with this command:
$ pacman -Qe > pacman-installed.txt
which will put a list of all the packages you explicitly installed into a text files.

Or am I missing the point of your question?

anrxc · 2008-12-29 01:44:37

In truth you can hibernate (suspend to disk) with as little as 256MB of swap. But you need to be careful when doing it if your RAM usage is very high at that moment. Both uswsusp and tuxonice can compress images and do a fine job of it, so your 75% of RAM (Logical swap 768 Mb) is just about right. But to be on the safe side your swap should be equal size as your RAM, so you don't need to think about it, ever.

For partitioning you can take a look at this table http://rute.rlworkman.net/node22.html#S … 0000000000 since everything is so much bigger these days you should take that into account when calculating final sizes.

grndrush · 2008-12-29 04:38:51

Xion:

Note again what I mentioned earlier. I think having / (physically) between swap and /home makes the most sense, from the standpoint of minimizing head movement, HDA wear-n-tear, even power consumption.

I prefer /boot at the very (physical) end of the drive. This allows swap to sit on the fastest part of the drive, and /boot, which is rarely accessed after sysinit, on the slowest. Slow down boot time by .25 secs so you can save .001 secs on every page load. Old mainframe mindset...

And keeping /var/cache/pacman, as ext3 or even ext2 - with 'mke2fs -b4096 -m0 -N16384' (or -N65536) will maximize your utilization of the partition. I find that, after a few months (I tend to hoard old versions and slowly delete them manually), /var/cache/pacman can require as much room as / does! Hence the justification for putting half your installation (the VERY 'non-critical' half, in the traditional sense).

You can also use XFS for /var/cache/pacman, of course. And the partition can butt right up the /boot at the end of the drive.

I've become a bit of a distro junkie the past few months, Arch always remaining my 'primary' install (wherever my mail store is, is where my 'primary machine' is ). I've found LVM2 very helpful - I'm off now to write a post on it.

Blue Skies...grndrush

Xi0N · 2008-12-29 07:50:26

And what about the partitions being primary, logical, etc?

Xauthority · 2008-12-29 08:53:51

weasel8 wrote:

Arm-the-Homeless wrote:
How can I back up the configuration files that I'd need to keep?
Er...just the way you'd back up any other files. Email them to yourself, burn them to a disc, put them on a USB stick, post them on dotfiles.org, put them in online storage. Pick one. When you're in the new install you can use the old configs to overwrite the new ones. As for a list of Pacman's installed packages, I'd go with this command:
$ pacman -Qe > pacman-installed.txt
which will put a list of all the packages you explicitly installed into a text files.
Or am I missing the point of your question?

Off-Topic\

$ pacman -Qe > pacman-installed.txt

This will produce the list of all package explicit installed, but with versions numbers.
So you cant after that just

pacman -S $(cat pacman-installed.txt)

to reinstall all the packages
so you need to

pacman -Qqe > pacman-installed.txt

Last edited by Xauthority (2008-12-29 08:54:49)

grndrush · 2008-12-29 09:56:08

And what about the partitions being primary, logical, etc?

Not sure exactly what you mean? /boot (or / , if /boot wasn't separate) has traditionally been on a primary partition (I don't THINK that's a hard rule today, but it likely depends on BIOS/mobo issues). All others can be either.

*Just out of preference*, I like to 'populate' all the primaries (/boot on sda1, swap on sda2, / on sda3, {sda4=extended partition) /home on sda5). Keeps from getting up into the double-digits sometimes.

The downside to the above (and why my current system isn't that way) is that, until recently, I used a primary partition whenever I installed a new distro, for /boot - I've found a better way now, but until recently I needed to keep a 'spare' primary NUMBER, at a minimum, in order to be able to try out a new distro.

Xi0N · 2008-12-29 10:21:55

Ok, now i have it more clear.

Thanks for the help!

dsr · 2008-12-29 18:31:16

XiON, logical partitions function the same as primary partitions. You just can't have more than four primary partitions using the traditional MS-DOS partition scheme, so you make the fourth partition an extended partition, which houses infinitely many logical partitions. I think GNU parted does that automatically, but (c)fdisk provides no such abstraction. So if you're using fdisk/cfdisk, make the first three partitions primary, the fourth extended, and the fifth through the last logical. These logical partitions are stored on the extended partition, but you can ignore the fourth partition for all intents and purposes. Just remember that your first logical partition is /dev/sda5, not /dev/sda4. As grndrush said, it shouldn't really matter which directories you put on which partitions, although /boot might have to be primary. I hope I cleared up any confusion you might have had.

Xi0N · 2008-12-29 20:17:14

Yes, thanks to everyone.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-29 00:05:45

Partitioning

#2 2008-12-29 00:17:11

Re: Partitioning

#3 2008-12-29 00:20:55

Re: Partitioning

#4 2008-12-29 01:05:09

Re: Partitioning

#5 2008-12-29 01:14:12

Re: Partitioning

#6 2008-12-29 01:22:28

Re: Partitioning

#7 2008-12-29 01:44:37

Re: Partitioning

#8 2008-12-29 04:38:51

Re: Partitioning

#9 2008-12-29 07:50:26

Re: Partitioning

#10 2008-12-29 08:53:51

Re: Partitioning

#11 2008-12-29 09:56:08

Re: Partitioning

#12 2008-12-29 10:21:55

Re: Partitioning

#13 2008-12-29 18:31:16

Re: Partitioning

#14 2008-12-29 20:17:14

Re: Partitioning

Board footer