Get help on partitioning here [Part 2]

javeree · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 453

Partitioning is one of the topics where everyone has (and is entitled to) his own opinions, so I'll feel free to present mine

The partitioning like you do it is fine, although I think that your swap partition is kinda oversized. If you ever need more than one or even .5 Gb swap, you really should consider buying some additional RAM. Another tip is if you use grub as a bootloader to create a directory /boot/grub and a symlink

cach0rr0 · Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 1:58 pm Post subject:

I don't know how well this would play with another distro on board (I've never tried it!), but I can't speak highly enough of LVM

LVM allows you a tremendous amount of flexibility, as you can resize volumes on the fly
Couple that with a modern file system such as XFS that allows for online growing or shrinking, and you basically have a system where you can afford to make mistakes when choosing partition sizes, as the mistakes are very quickly and easily remedied.

For my buddy's server, this is how we have things set up

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 3:54 pm Post subject:

Hi murderpenguin, I don't see any problem if you use your current partition layout.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Now let's have some fun... Obviously you need root (/) and swap, and as others have said, a separate /home is good, so your data can survive a reinstall.

Beyond that, I've gone after "activity type". An ext3 filesystem is resistant to fragmentation, but it can still get fragmented. But by doing activity-oriented partitioning that fragmentation can be minimized. With a few notable exceptions, / and /usr are not just read-mostly, they're read-almost-always. Then /var gets written almost as much as it's read. With ext3, the act of writing can itself be a defragmenter, depending on circumstances - mainly freespace and its distribution. But there are a few pieces of / and /usr that are heavily read-write - most notably /usr/portage and /usr/src.

So for my normal install, I might have root (/), /home, swap, and /var partitions, but with a small twist. In /var I have /var/usr/portage and /var/usr/src, and I bind-mount those over /usr/portage and /usr/src, respectively. Thus the heavily-written parts of / or /usr are really moved to /var. In addition I make /var/root/tmp and /var/root/root, and bind-mount them over /tmp and /root, respectively. Now root only gets written for /etc/mtab and software updates - all other writes go to /home or /var.

To be honest, the effectiveness of this is all pet theorizing - I've never evaluated the effectiveness in preventing fragmentation. Sometime I should boot a CD and give it a check, but then I need a control system to compare to.
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Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Mine is somewhat similar to cach0rr0's buddy's server:

timeBandit · Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 5:24 pm Post subject:

Merged murderpenguin's post onward to the partitioning sticky.

@murderpenguin, welcome to Gentoo and congrats on your first install. Please be sure to read the forum Guidelines (when your eyes recover from all the reading to get this far

) and note in particular #3 (search before posting, which includes looking for relevant stickies (like this one) and FAQs). Thanks!
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Plymouth · n00b Joined: 17 Oct 2009 Posts: 1

I'm currenly running Linux Mint quite happily.

However, I am aware that this distro is like a bicycle with stablizers, and so am interested in experimenting with other distros.

Since I have a large capacity hard disk, what I'd ideally like to do, is install another distro alongside Mint, and flip between them as and when necessary.

I can create the necessary extra partitions, but I don't know how to specify which partitions the new distro should be installed into - ie, ensure that it doesn't overwrite Mint!

Any help and advice would be gratefully received

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2605

Merged the above post.
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NotQuiteSane · Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:38 pm Post subject:

I need to keep windows on my new netbook, and dual boot. I haven't owned a copy of windows since the early 90's and am needing to verify my partition scheme. using 160gb drive.

sda1 64 mb /boot
sda2 512 mb /
sda3 4 gb swap
sda4 5 gb /mnt/windows
sda6 (rest of drive) LVM

is that a good layout, or does windows need to be @ sda1, and move the rest down?

NQS
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aCOSwt · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 8:45 am Post subject:

Hello,

Expecting to run in a x86-64 multilib environment with 4G ram, I would like your opinion about the (im)pertinence of the following partition scheme.

Everything is sliced into an extended partition :

/................ 256 M ....... ext2
swap........ 6 G
/xtmp .... 10 G .......... ext2
/var ....... 3G ............. ext3
/usropt ... 64G ......... ext3
/home .... rest of the disk.

with :

/tmp symlinked to /xtmp/tmp
/var/tmp symlinked to /xtmp/var/tmp
/usr symlinked to /usropt/usr
/opt symlinked to /usropt/opt

Additionally, (sorry for that noobish question but I am used to other operating systems for which I never had to worry about this) which partition should I flag active under fdisk ?
The extended one ? The logical one containing root ? both ?

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I don't quite know what you'd do with 256G of /, since I've never used more than
32G. I suppose if you put a lot of stuff into /opt you might need it, but in that
case /opt might be better off on another partition, since rebuilding 256G worth
of data would be a pain. In that case you could link /usr/opt to /opt, though
I've never known /usr/opt to use a lot of space. (Note: if you know differently,
stick with what you know - this is definitely a situation in which YMMV.)

/var needs to be around 8G, at least, preferably 16G if you are building big
packages like Open Office.

/usr/portage is best put on its own partition, since it needs a lot of small files,
best handled by a filesystem set up for that layout. 16G would be ample.

I don't know what /xtmp is, since I've never seen it.

Generally I'd make all file systems ext3 or preferably ext4, except for /boot,
which I keep as ext2 simply because grub _used_ not to handle ext3; I'm
not sure what it can handle now. And a separate /boot partition of 64 or
128 MB will make your life a lot easier when it comes to updating the system.

I'd be inclined to avoid symlinking where possible; I'm not sure what it does
for speed.

If you are really flush with space, add a spare 8GB / partition which you can
boot via the grub menu to repair/update your main setup. It won't need X;
just a login to a shell prompt.

Will

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 4:26 pm Post subject:

aCOSwt,

If you are short of partitions use LVM.
/boot cannot be inside LVM but / can if you are prepared to vive with an inird to start LVM before you mount root.

LVM gives you dynamically resizable partitions. Make sure you choose filesystem types than can also be grown/shrunk.
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aCOSwt · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 4:30 pm Post subject:

Thank you for answering will.

As a matter of fact, it is not 256G that I intend to give to / but 256M

Regarding the size of /var, your advice is wise however, it seems to be because of /var/tmp
and as I intend to symlink /var/tmp to somewhere in xtmp where it can share 10G with /tmp, I hope that 3G will be enough for handling the other potentially "big" directories of /var such as www.

Thank you for suggesting ext4 ! The handbook does not mention this filesystem type, and as I had stuck to the handbook for installing...
I come back from wikipedia about it and read some performance testings, I certainly would have had some regrets not knowing it before going further in the installation process.
I will follow you and change everything for ext4 apart / remaining in ext2 as well as xtmp as I do not care about journaling for tmps.

I feel symlinks more rational regarding space management. I agree that they necessarily increase the access time to the real file however... certainly less than a shortcut-icon on any desktop manager...

Regarding the space left free for a rescue partition, I have a 4G old IDE drive that I thought would deal with this.

Thanks again will.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 5:24 pm Post subject:

aCOSwt,

256M is too small for / I'm using 625M there now.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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aCOSwt · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 5:30 pm Post subject:

Thank you NeddySeagoon for the warning about size for / , I will put 1G as I will probably have a couple of kernels.

Regarding LVM... Hmmm... I may be wrong but... it sounds like GEOM...
And having had many problems implementing GEOM on my FreeBSD box... I was a bit... reluctant...
Nevertheless I will read more about LVM.

Thanks again.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

Sorry, that was careless of me; however, if 256G is curiously large, 256M is
way too small. I wouldn't build with less than 4G, even for a system without
X; 8G is tight, and 16G preferable. Note that the kernels themselves take up
little space; a separate /boot can be 64M or less, but you need at least enough
space on / to unpack a stage 3 file, and if you then want to install Gnome or
KDE a lot more.

Will

NotQuiteSane · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 2:08 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 2:25 pm Post subject:

NotQuiteSane,

Oops, 140Mb of that is my stage3 that I installed from
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

NotQuiteSane · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 3:45 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 7:26 pm Post subject:

NotQuiteSane,

I've rationalised my network now. The last i586 or older has gone, it just i686, amd64 and a U10 for interests sake and a web server, since SPARC won't run script kiddies shell code.

I tend to keep everything I download so I have some old things kicking about
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

aCOSwt · Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 11:47 am Post subject:

Thanks to cwr and NeddySeagoon, and, even if I have been very surprised by NeddySeagoon's need for more than 512M on / (Probably a Site-Admin characteristic :mrgreen:

) I amended my partition scheme. :

/ - Ext2 - 1G
/Xtmp - Ext2 - 16G
/var - Ext4 - 4G
/UsrOpt - Ext4 - 64G
/home - Ext4 - Rest of the disk

With Additionally :
/tmp -> /Xtmp/tmp
/var/tmp -> /Xtmp/var/tmp
/usr -> /UsrOpt/usr
/opt -> /UsrOpt/opt

And (To start with) a 1G Swapfile in /Xtmp.

aCOSwt · Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 3:33 pm Post subject:

Providing I am right in the analysis of the problem of unresolved references I am facing here :
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-808057-highlight-.html
The above configuration (with the symlinks) appears over-stupid ! At least non-functional !
It appears I would better do things like this :
mount -o bind /UsrOpt/usr /usr

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2009 8:40 pm Post subject:

aCOSwt,

I would use lvm. I assume you are using this somewhat strange partition layout becuase you need more than 15 partitions or you feel the need to resize things "on the fly".

lvm copes with all of these things. On the down side, its another layer of software between you and your platters.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

aCOSwt · Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:50 pm Post subject:

ITAFurla · n00b Joined: 19 Feb 2009 Posts: 18 Location: Italy

Hi all!!

I recently bought a new laptop (hp dv6-2006el) with the intention of install gentoo in dual boot with windows7.

Surprise! there are already 4 primary partitions!!
in the order:
"System",
"(C: )",
"Recovery (D: )",
"HP_tools".

Now the question is:
how can I create another primary partition, set it as extended and put one of these in a secondary partition?

Other questions when this is solved.

P.S.: I hope my english can be understood :oops:

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