Arch Linux

eyolf

Member

From: Copenhagen

Registered: 2005-11-29

Posts: 339

Website

Advice sought for new partitioning table

I'm about to get a new laptop - going from 20 to 160 available Gb - and I want to get my partitions right this time.

- is there any reason at all to assume that I will need more than 10 Gb for /usr and 5 Gb for /opt in the lifetime of this computer? Or the other way around: is that a waste of space already? Will kde also be moved to /usr in the foreseeable future, so that I should just forget about a big /opt partition?

- is it correct that a reiser partition would be a good thing for the pacman "database" - that reiser would handle all the small files quicker than ext3?

- last time, I made the mistake of following the advice somewhere (not on the Arch list) that more than 200 Mb for the rest when home, usr, opt and tmp were out of the way, would be a waste of space. I had then not counted on /var/cache/pacman and the arch installer's way of handling the tmp partition. I took this:

Do not mount /tmp on a separate partition just yet, as it will badly confuse the installer! Simply leave the designated /tmp partition alone until the installation is done, and configure the partition manually after you have a running system if you must have a separate partition for /tmp.

to mean that one should not make a separate tmp partition - I read that too quickly...
Anyway, I guess I want separate partitions for /var and /tmp, right?

- I dual-boot, and even though I very rarely use Windows, my current setup has a document folder for all my ongoing work on a fat32 partition. I guess that is not necessarily the best setup for a day-to-day linux work environment, since it means that I mostly work on a partition which is open for fragmenting and all sorts of windows badness. It's a trade-off, I guess, as long as full rw of ext3 from Windows is (still?) dubious. Or is it?

So, I'm considering something like this:

\ 1Gb   ext3
\usr 10Gb ext3
\opt 5Gb ext3
\tmp 5Gb ext3 (or is that too much?)
\var 1Gb ext3 (or reiser?)
\var\lib\pacman 50Mb reiser (or should I just put the whole \var on a reiser partition?)
\mnt\shared 1Gb fat32
\home - the rest, on an ext3 partition

Does this sound reasonable?

tardo

Member

Registered: 2006-07-15

Posts: 526

Re: Advice sought for new partitioning table

Out of curiosity... how do different partitions help? I don't see the benefit since they're still on the same drive...

dolby

Member

From: 1992

Registered: 2006-08-08

Posts: 1,581

Re: Advice sought for new partitioning table

So, I'm considering something like this:

\ 1Gb   ext3
\usr 10Gb ext3
\opt 5Gb ext3
\tmp 5Gb ext3 (or is that too much?)
\var 1Gb ext3 (or reiser?)
\var\lib\pacman 50Mb reiser (or should I just put the whole \var on a reiser partition?)
\mnt\shared 1Gb fat32
\home - the rest, on an ext3 partition

Does this sound reasonable?

i find this a bit "paranoid". too many partitions for no reason imo.
i would suggets the following

/ *Gb   ext3
/var *Gb ext3 (or reiser?) (reiser is much faster with pacman its true but ppl              seem to fear it will break at some point for some reason). size depends on how many things u want to keep in your package cache.
/home - the rest, on an ext3 partition
maybe a /boot  too 50-100mb ext2 if u need encryption of / or even maybe if u dont

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klixon

Member

From: Nederland

Registered: 2007-01-17

Posts: 525

Re: Advice sought for new partitioning table

Partitions do help a bit in reducing the overall amount of fragmentation...

Besides all other suggestions, have you thought about using LVM? In combination with ext3 you can resize partitions on the fly (well, grow is a bit less hassle that shrink, but both are possible).
That way you can start small and grow whatever's necessary

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kano

Member

From: Michigan

Registered: 2007-05-04

Posts: 185

Website

Re: Advice sought for new partitioning table

Partitions do help a bit in reducing the overall amount of fragmentation...
<snip>

this doesn't seem to be true for me... my root is under 1% fragmentation after about a month on this install, and my /home is at 3% after about 6 months. The highest I've seen on my /home was 30% but it dropped to 3% after deleting about 30gb from my downloads folder, heh. this might have something to do with xfs though, i've never checked fragmentation of a ext3 volume.

anyways,
my setup:
/boot EXT2 (50mb)
/ XFS (9.5gb)
/home XFS (160gb)

works good for me. my root has about 2.75gb used, and I have about 480 packages installed.
If I ever got new drives though, I'd probably do something like this:

/boot 50mb (ext2, not on LVM)
/ 5gb (xfs or ext3)
/var 5gb (reiser)
/home 100gb (xfs or ext3)

using LVM, so I could grow whatever partition needed more space. anymore seems overkill to me.

Last edited by kano (2007-07-03 07:11:03)

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