Gavin Seddon wrote:
From reading these posts I have sorted out 'other' issues that are off list. Namely [...] creating a partition for /usr/portage to 'aid' fragmentation.
I did that some time ago in a simple-minded fashion, but I've had to revise my layout somewhat. I had an ext3 partition solely for /usr/portage, and it was mounted on that node, but every emerge --sync deleted the /lost+found directory. I don't know how serious that is, but of course no-one likes to have damaged file systems on their boxes, so I used tune2fs -c to set the mount count to 1 so that it was repaired every time the box booted, but that was taking too long and it was only a palliative anyway. The solution was easy, though of course I didn't see it at first! I only had to point /usr/portage to /usr-bits/portage (/usr-bits being the mount point of the partition) instead of mounting the partition directly in place.
A word of caution for anyone considering adopting Duncan's scheme without much thought: what he says is certainly good sense, but don't go copying him if you're just splitting out bits of the file system that can be made common to different running systems. I spent half of last night exploring some of the snags! My aim was to separate some large slabs of files into their own partitions and mount those partitions on whichever system I was booting. I have four Linux systems multibooting on this box, and it seems tidy to find common areas and treat them as such.
Don't combine systems' /var/log directories - you will end up with deeply troubled emerge.log and PORT_LOGDIR records.
Don't combine systems' /usr/src directories. It won't do much harm, but the records of which kernel version is installed in each system will cause overwriting anyway, thus spoiling the idea, especially if you have USE=symlink for gentoo-sources.
I'm not yet sure of the wisdom of combining /var/tmp from different systems: I haven't yet sorted out the consequences for the portage work directories. Watch this space.
Apologies if I'm not making much sense today - blame the loss of sleep and the head cold that probably caused it :-(
-- Rgds Peter. -- [email protected] mailing list
