Interesting fight. Let me join in :-) On 04/12/2011 06:17 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > Igor Chudov wrote: >> I used Linux since 1995. I do not personally see the point of having /usr >> mounted separately. >>
My Linux experience only goes back to Feb 1994 when it was more than a toy. If I remember my Slackware from Linux Systems Labs 49 floppy disks correctly, it acted like most Unix systems of the day with multiple partitions for this or that. For a while, OS and user data grew faster than disk space and it was critical to be able to move partitions around different disk drives without major system downtime. However, argument today is that it's easier for people to have one partition for everything especially on workstations. Many distributions come that way by default, similar to DOS based OS. That not good idea for a number of reasons. Reinstalling or upgrading requires user data (/home/*) to be formatted along with the rest of the disk is just one of them. > The idea, I think, is that the /boot file system, and maybe the /root > file system, also, are nearly static. /boot was added because of crappy BIOS that was not able to handle cylinders beyond 1024 years ago. That's not needed anymore and makes no sense either. What good is it booting kernel from /boot and then fail to access core utilities (fdisk, fsck, df, etc.) on another partition to fix the system. On older systems / needs to be bellow 1024 cyl and you'll be fine without /boot. > A static file system is a lot less likely to get corrupted. If a power Static is only static if you make it so. With exception of embedded systems, most workstations and servers are not that way these days. It's hard to make / static when /etc needs to be written into for different reasons during OS use. > failure, hard drive or memory error, > etc. corrupts the /usr file system, at least you can boot the OS and > start trying to repair the damage. > That's very good point. Let me add that /usr is just one large file structure with over 260k files per filelight report in my Kubuntu at this point. None of those files or libraries is or should be needed for any core utility to troubleshoot and possibly fix OS issues. /sbin /lib are for that. Advantages of having a number of partitions are numerous. fsck during bootup can be done in parallel on different partitions to bootup faster. In Linux, free RAM is used to a large degree to cache file directories and related information for faster access to needed files. If part of RAM gets corrupted, then a related partition could get corrupted as well. It's unlikely all partitions will get corrupted at the same time though. My position is to have at least /home on separate partition as that allows for OS reinstall or upgrade without wiping out user's files (1.115M files in my case) and lessen a chance to corrupt the whole system when something goes wrong. Depending on situation, it's also good to have separate /var in case logging gets out of hand and it does in some development and production environments. Same for /tmp where some user's create huge temporary files. At least you can login and fix the problem in such situations. The following partition scheme never failed me: /dev/sda1 14417392 1670252 12014776 13% / /dev/sda7 4804736 543444 4017224 12% /tmp /dev/sda5 14417392 7432168 6252860 55% /usr /dev/sda8 144183992 69423636 67436196 51% /virtual /dev/sda9 775915144 264384432 472116440 36% /home That's hardwired partitioning scheme. Logical volumes are a different matter. Virtual systems are different and partitioning is not as critical as it is on base OS. Still, /home is better to reside on different partition for backups, moves, templating and other reasons. > I have some systems set up this way. > > Jon -- Rafael ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forrester Wave Report - Recovery time is now measured in hours and minutes not days. Key insights are discussed in the 2010 Forrester Wave Report as part of an in-depth evaluation of disaster recovery service providers. Forrester found the best-in-class provider in terms of services and vision. Read this report now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/ibm-webcastpromo _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
