If use ext4 for /boot, is it safe to use noatime? I.e. what I'm wondering is whether GRUB will be adversely affected like some programs are. That aside is there a significant different between using ext4 instead of ext2 for a separate /boot partition.
WRT to /var I think I'll just keep it in / partition as ext4.
The real question is wether you need a separate boot partition. I think the answer is no. You can of course mount with noatime, grub (or whatever boot loader you use) just read the files according to its config. Personnally, I was never convinced by having multiple partitions. This is completely inflexible and you will have difficulties if one of them get full (just notice that Windows, and I think Macosx keep everything on a single partition too) (if you use efi, then you need an efi boot partition). If one really want to prevent log from filling the hard disk, I think that there are more flexible ways that having a separate partition. By the way if /var get full that means that the pacman database cannot grow anymore; so no pacman -Syu anymore. I do see what it really solve in comparaison to having a single partition full of logs that you can easily rm (by the way vi /etc/systemd/journald.conf will probably help more than fdisk on this matter).
]]>Also, GRUB works with ext4 so you don't need to format /boot with ext2.
If use ext4 for /boot, is it safe to use noatime? I.e. what I'm wondering is whether GRUB will be adversely affected like some programs are. That aside is there a significant different between using ext4 instead of ext2 for a separate /boot partition.
WRT to /var I think I'll just keep it in / partition as ext4.
]]>Welcome to 2013.
]]>/boot/efi, fat32, 512MiB
/boot, ext2, 512MiB
swap, 1GiB
/, ext4, 20GiB
/var, reiserfs, 8GiB
/home, ext4, 100+GiB
Other than adjusting some of the sizes, the only change I think I'll make is the FS choice for /var as resierfs does not support TRIM. I thought ext4 initially but am toying with the idea of btrfs instead (for /var only, / would remain ext4). Would there be a decent performance improvement? And would I need to do anything extra during/after installation? I know use of btrfs *volumes* requires a few things be done, but as I'll just be using a single partition I imagine little will need to be done. I'll probably just use gparted via a live cd/usb before installing to make things easier.
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