Dead horse anyone? Partitioning Schemes!

[wildcat]

Let's beat on this dead horse a bit more, shall we?

What is your partitioning scheme on a large, say 20Gb and higher, disk? I sense that there is nothing approaching consensus out there. I see dozens of recommendations on various web sites, ranging from one big partition for everything to as many as nine partitions. Let me add that I think that one ought to have more than just /, /var, and /usr, to separate data from software and Linux from layered software and user junk from everything else. It would even be better, I think, if those three partitions were on separate physical spindles, but with just a single large disk, what partitioning scheme makes most sense?

Also, I notice that Mandrake 8.1 installation documentation does not mention the /boot partition as an addition to /, which other sources generally recommend. What's up with that?

[thedexman]

Don't know what's up with Mandrake, but I always have a /boot partition. Actually I have the 20GB in my PC with 10 partitions, with very large /home, /usr, as well as a large, seperate partition for /usr/share/mp3.

[phazeman]

I'm not a Linux professor, but, some GURU told me to do it this way :
500 MB - '/' Root partition
Your Ram X 2 - Swap
5 GB - '/usr' partition
All the rest - '/home' partition
The guy told me, that this is the simplest and good partitioning, and i work with it for a 1/2 year - no complaints

[X_console]

It really depends on what you want to do. If you're planning on running it as a desktop, then I'd suggest having a large /usr and /home partition. I don't usually bother with a /boot. My partitions usually consist of:

/
/home
/usr
/var
/tmp

You'll want to make sure that /var and /tmp have their own separate partitions.

[mychl]

I just set up a 60 Gig drive like this

hdc1 20Mb /boot
hdc2 10GB /
hdc4 20GB Windows98
hdc3 29GB Extended
-hdc5 6GB /home
-hdc6 18GB /usr
-hdc7 2.5GB /var
-hdc8 2.5GB /tmp
-hdc9 600MB SWAP

critiques??

[Dark Ninja]

I was sick of the whole partitioning thing...so...I took a 25 gig Linux partition...and...

That was it. One partition. (I do have others for backup...but...that's all they are. Backup. Oh well.)

:D

Dark Ninja

[Lorithar]

recently,
building a router firewall for a friend on a limited system (2x2.1 gig scsi drives in a dual P1 system)

50Mb /boot
500Mb /
~1Gb /usr
250Mb /var
sym /tmp --> /var/tmp
200Mb /home
450Mb /usr/local
250Mb /opt
250Mb /var/spool/squid/cache
~50Mb /swap
-- I just got creative since the system will support squid as a proxy and cache, dns and a webserver and ftp hidden in a chroot jail in opt..... I think I was pretty thorough in splitting things up ...
besides he won't be running X on this on a full time basis and it has 98Mb ram...

[wildcat]

Now, about that swap space. Twice the size of RAM is pretty much standard on big box UNIXes, and 3x is even better on some of them (the more recent Solaris releases require only 1x.) But I see that some guys here are stingy with swap psrtitions. How does that affect performance?

I've seen some weird problems on HP-UX and other UNIX systems where the swap space was set under 1.5 - 1.2 xRAM.

[bdg1983]

Running Linux on 2 pc's. Two at work and two at home.

320MB
384MB
512MB
640MB

All with 128MB swap partition and I've never seen the swap in use. I run Gkrellm on all and monitor the swap usage.

The work pc's (320 & 384MB) usually have 3 or 4 Konqueror's open along with Konsole, Xnest, Quanta+ and others.

Swap is always nil.

[Lorithar]

*grins* ...

This box isn't really a workhorse system .. with 98Mb of ram, not running a desktop 85% of the time, and even then the desktop will only be used to run Amanda (backup) I sincerely doubt the box will use all 98Mb. ... point to be made .. the box COULD use more swap ... however there will be an external disk and tapedrive mounted, the external disk will be created as a dumpdisk for amanda .. and well ... that dumpdisk will be swapspace.. (a la solaris /tmp) ..not likely to be a big issue there ...

On MY personal system I have 398Mb ram and 750Mb swap .. but I run all sorts of crap .. including a webserver, mysql, desktop, flash, sound, browsers, wine etc etc etc...

[stiles]

/ 200MB (you can go as little as 50MB, my / has 24MB used, make sure you isolate the / filesytem properly though)
/var 300-500MB (unless your running a news, mail, print or webserver then add space for you spool/web root directory)
/usr 800MB-? (room for all system software)
/home whatever floats your boat
/tmp tmpfs (this is a memory resident filesystem that overflows to swap)
/var/tmp tmpfs
/boot 10MB (if you need it)
/swap (twice your memory is good, maybe add some for tmpfs too, if you have seperate disk place swap partitions on each disk to improve I/O).

and maybe:

/opt (for 3rd party apps, not usually used in linux, you can prob use bind mounts for this)

for info on tmpfs and bind mounts:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs3.html

[ 08 November 2001: Message edited by: stiles ]

[X_console]

Originally posted by Dark Ninja:
<STRONG>I was sick of the whole partitioning thing...so...I took a 25 gig Linux partition...and...

That was it. One partition. (I do have others for backup...but...that's all they are. Backup. Oh well.)

:D

Dark Ninja</STRONG>

You really should consider splitting everything up. In the event that the partition gets corrupted, you lose everything. If it's split up and one of them gets corrupted, then it's not so bad. Just my opinion.