[LBo] Question re: partitioning

[Andrew Henry]

Stefan Waidele wrote:
> Allen schrieb:
>> Back when I was running Redhat 7.3, all the the advice seemed to be
>> to make a partition for boot, swap, and a few more like root, home,
>> bin, sbin and var. Now almost all the advice seems to be to only have
>> two partitions: swap and / with everything, var, home, sbin, bin,
>> etc, all under the second partition.
>>
>> Why the change? And does it impact performance?
>
> In fact, many small partitions can still be better from a performance
> viewpoint. You can choose filesystems/storage-techniques for each
> partition based on the data that will be stored there (e.g. no
> journaling on /tmp, RAID5 for /home, RAID1 for /, whatever for these
> big video-files, whatever else for these masses of mp3-files (all
> under 5MB),...)
>
> The reason why _we on LBo_ suggest only one partition to hold
> everything is the fact that it is much easier for people who are new
> to linux. The "many-partitions-approach" caused quite a bit of confusion.
>
> For most Linux-users one big root (and maybe another bigger
> data-partition) is alright. This is even more true as soon as you want
> to try out different distributions on one PC... :)
>
> This is a page you want to read:
> http://linuxbasics.org/tutorials/advanced/various/perfect_partitioning
> as well as this one:
> http://linuxbasics.org/tutorials/advanced/various/mypartitionisfulldoinee=
dtoreinstall
>
>
> HTH,
>
> Stefan
What is the reasoning behind having extra partitions for sbin and bin? =


My reasoning behind partitioning my system is that you have maybe a boot
partition, so that if the system borks (either boot or the other
partitions, then it can be easier to recover, as you can still boot into
*something*, if boot is intact, or if boot borks, then data is still
intact--but I personally don't see this partition as essential on a home
system.  Then there is swap, which is mandatory I think, then a sensible
option is to create a /home partition, if for nothing else than to be
able to wipe a system, and install new version of current distro without
wiping personal data or having to restore backups, then / for everything
else, which tends to be 'software' which isn't edited much.  Lastly
there is tmp for all temp data that can really fragment a disc or as I
recently found out, create a partition for /var with a softlink to
/var/tmp from /tmp, to save from having 2 partitions for /var and /tmp
which can both contain temp data.  To summerise:

/boot
/
swap
/home
/var

This is my method at least and im sure there are other theories, but why
would you split up root even further by having separate partitions for
what is essentially, 'just software' (/bin, /sbin)?

I hadn't thought of partitioning from a performance point of view, but
it's a good point.  My perspective is that things should be separated so
that the disc gets the least fragmented, which means that you need to
classify the type of files you have (temp files, personal data, static
personal data (music videos pictures etc), system software etc etc.

--andrew

-- =

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