Partitioning Advice

[johnk73]

Hi I'm looking for some partitioning advice about the size and filesystem type I should use for a new gentoo install, I have 14Gb's to use. I've read a lot about different partition sizes for /var, /home, and /, when running a server but I can't find anything relating to desktop machines.

I'm going to be using the system for games (UT2003) email, web-browsing and dvd-ripping/viewing. So would I gain any advantage from not using a single large partition?
The only partitions I've decieded on are:

Boot ext2 100mb
swap 1000Mb (on a second disk)

Cheers,
John

[Ian Goldby]

Sounds good. 1000Mb swap is extravagent, but it won't do you any harm. The swap = 2 to 3 times RAM rule doesn't really apply when you get to RAM over a few 100 MB.

For reference, my partitions are: boot 100MB, swap 512MB, root ~12GB, windows ~6.4GB.

My RAM is 196MB, and I find that once I start using more than a couple of 100MB swap, the system starts disk-thrashing and becomes unusable - well before the swap is exhausted.

Separate partitions for /home, /var, /tmp etc are not really useful on a desktop machine and make like difficult if one becomes full while there is still plenty of space elsewhere.

[Raccroc]

my two cents...

Agreed, 1000mb is WAY to big. Rule I've been using lately is 2x ram if <256mb. Otherwise, ram + 20mb. Seems to work pretty well.

As far as partitions goes...I'd put /var and /tmp off of root even on a desktop. There are still way to many things that can happen which can cause a rogue process to fill /tmp or your logger to fill /var (and if they are on the same partitions as /, they'll take down the system). A good example is iptables. I had it fill over 1gb of data in a little over an hour due to a disagreement it had with my pix about dns. Filled /var and the service stopped logging. No worries.

One word of caution.../var doesn't need to be very big (espically if not using as a server); however, portage does use /var/tmp for compilation by default and will cause thing to fail if it runs out of space. If you put /var on it's own partition, be sure and change the portage_tmpdir option in your make.conf.

[johnk73]

OK I'll half my swap partition size, what size should I make the /var and /tmp partitions would 1GB be enough or is that too much?

[Jimbow]

I've got 21 Gig available for Linux and I've got that split up in three partitions of 7 Gig each. This has worked out really well. I currently have 2 forms of Gentoo and one Debian installed. If I ever run out of space, I will use one of the "spare" partitions as needed. I am looking forward to upgrading to the new ReiserFS when it comes out. I will just format a partition, boot off the install cd and cp -a my system to the new file system.

I've done it other ways and this has been the best for me. The key is to have 3 or 4 medium sized partitions to play around with.

BTW: I use the same /boot and swap for all of the Linuxes.
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After Perl everything else is just assembly language.

[Carlos]

If you have a relatively large amount of RAM it can make sense to mount /var/tmp and /tmp as tempfs, which exists entirely on RAM. Have a good amount of swap space, though.
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Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

[gojuka]

[bumpus]

I'd pretty strongly recommend that you make a separate /home partition. It'll make things a lot easier for you if you ever decide that you want/need to reinstall your system.
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Just because I can.

[barlad]

Well, if you plan to store anything critical on your linux box, such as documents for your job, studies or whatever... go for a / and /home partition (/var and /tmp seems useless to me, in most cases at least). maybe 2/3 for / and 1/3 for /home ?.

If you don't plan to store anything important and have no personal information that has to be saved whatever happens, go for a 100mb /boot, 500 /swap and the rest in /.

As a desktop user, reiserFS is what I would go for. Pretty reliable and good performances overall.