Mike Meyer wrote:
You assume that "running out of space" happens over time, but with some
runaway process logging to a file, for example, the partition filling up
will still happen without you expecting it. It might take a bit longer
with a big disk, but 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes isn't much
different in terms of warning.
Yes, I'm assuming that "running out of space" happens over
time. Sustained I/O speeds on modern hardware was around 100MB/sec
last time I looked. So a good, large disk - say a terabyte raid (you
need raid to get those performance numbers, so call it 2 500GB disks
to keep it simple) - will take about three hours to fill *if you do
nothing but write to the disk*. A runaway process - especially one
generating log data - is normally doing other things that it's trying
to log information about.
I don't have terabyte raids and for me a "big" disk is 250Gb.
A runaway system demon writing to disk might well do other things. A
badly written user program might do nothing but write to disk. If you
run servers that just run a bunch of standard ports and system demons,
then this is unlikely to happen to you. If you work in an environment
where one or more fallible programmers churn through gigabytes of data
it's depressingly easy to accidentally do *nothing* but write to disk.
A further reason to separate partitions is that dump works at the level
of a partition. Different partitions may have very different backup
requirements, and for those of us without huge tape drives, partitioning
to a size that can be dumped on one tape makes life easier.
That's one of the technical reasons I mentioned in the part you
didn't quote.
To my mind, it only takes *one* technical reason. If I need multiple
partitions to make backups easy, then arguments about log files are
irrelevant :-)
Well, there are always special cases. But hardware is so cheap these
days, I'm used to fine-tuning the *system*, not just the partition.
If something is so critical that it needs it's own partition, it's
probably so critical that it needs it's own system as well. In fact,
most of the thing I work on these days are so critical that they need
several systems, half of them at a second site with automatic failover
between them.
Not everyone is in a position to throw money at everything and what's
cheap to you isn't cheap to everyone. I can't possibly justify one
system for everything that needs a partition, nor do I even feel the
need to do that. If anything, it would be a major inconvenience.
Frankly, if you're really worried about
bootable slices, you should be advocating giving FreeBSD the ability
to boot from a logical volume.
Who said I didn't? I have no objection to such a facility and would
welcome it. It just imagined that extending the number of partitions
from 8 to 16 would have been easier than booting from logical slices.
If booting from logical slices is easier then I'm all for it.
--Alex
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