Another important advantage to partitions is that the existence of a boot partition isolates the firmware from changes in the filesystem used for the root.
Advantage #2 that you cite below is also quite valuable - it makes it easy to preserve user data while replacing/recovering/updating the system software using the "blast on a fresh image" method. [email protected] wrote: > On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Chris Ball wrote: > >> Hi, [adding fedora-olpc-list to CC] >> >> > Are we stuck with 1.1GiB or do we think we can reduce that further? >> >> Well, there are a few things going on here. We have activities and >> content (and will probably add more activities and content) that's >> currently part of the 1.1GiB, but is actually in /home, and isn't >> going to count towards our "system partition" use. So we need to >> split that out in our calculations; currently 162MiB of the 1.14GiB >> used is in /home, so we're actually just under 1GiB. >> >> It seems likely that we can reduce the system partition size by one >> or two hundred MiB without extreme effort, but I haven't looked into >> where the space is going yet. However, after we do that we're going >> to want to add more applications, such as OpenOffice, so I wouldn't >> want to commit to staying under 1GiB for a single system partition. >> (It wouldn't be necessarily *bad* to use more than that, if the >> things we're going to add are valuable and we've cut out the cruft >> we're not actually using.) > > so you are moving away from abiword (which I understand write is a > derivitive of) and adding openoffice?? > > given the capabilities of these machines, and the bloat of openoffice, > I'm not sure that's a wise move. > >> So, let's go ahead with the discussion about whether we want to use >> partitions and what they should be called/what filesystems we should >> use for them, without committing on a size just yet. If one of the >> fedora-olpc readers could come up with a report listing our installed >> RPMs by size on disk, that would rock. > > while it is traditional to use seperate partitions, on a 4G flash > drive is it really worth the cost of guessing sizes wrong? > > advantages to using partitions > > 1. filling up one partition won't affect others (making it easier to > run tools to recover space) > > 2. you can wipe one parition in an upgrade without affecting data in > other partitions > > 3. it's possible to set different permissions on different paritions > (nodev, etc), which increases security if users only have access to > write on those partitons. > > disadvantages to using partitions > > primarily boils down to one > > you have to decide ahead of time how big to make the partitions, and > changing this later is non-trivial. if you guess wrong you can end up > running out of space in one place while you have extra space in others. > > > > In my opinion, there are two reasonable approaches > > 1. multiple system paritions so that you can have two completely > independant systems on the box and dual boot between them > > > 2. single partition > > > since this is only a 4G drive, I would tend to go with #2. > > in the current discussion the proposal is to leave 1/4 of the disk > space unallocated, but unavailable to the users 'just in case' it's > needed for the OS later. > > the multiple system partition approach has a similar problem, but > there it gets a lot more value for the space. > > the fact that it takes ~1G for a minimal desktop system is very > disappointing. > > David Lang _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
