On Tuesday 27 March 2012 14:34:03, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote: > On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 20:01 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 07:49:00PM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote: > > > I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to create a > > > separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my first Gentoo > > > systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of fragmentation, much > > > slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked it when I changed my > > > partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage) separate and a lot of disk > > > space lost (I remember portage tree reached around 3 GB of disk space > > > while I am now running with 300MB) > > > > > > Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different > > > partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be better > > > for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled, but maybe you > > > have other different setups. > > > > To be honest, I don't think it is wise to describe it in the Gentoo Handbook > > just yet. I don't mind having it documented elsewhere, but the separate > > partition is not mandatory for getting Gentoo up and running. The > > instructions currently also just give an example partition layout and tell > > users that different layouts are perfectly possible. > > > > We need to take into consideration what is needed (must) for a Gentoo > > installation, what is seriously recommended (should), what is nice to have > > (could), etc. And for me, having a separate /usr/portage is a nice-to-have > > imo. > > The partitioning scheme is something that the user needs to decide on > *before* getting Gentoo up and running. After the user had finished > installing the operating system, it's too late to inform him about the > advantages of a separate /usr/portage.
It does not have to be a separate *physical* partition. It could be set up as a loop device without any real downsides: /usr/portage/tree.ext4 /usr/portage/tree ext4 loop,noatime 0 0 An advantage is that it can be easily resized if necessary. > IMHO, chapter 4 of the handbook needs the following changes: > > 1. ext4, not ext3, needs to be recommended as the default filesystem. We > have kernel 3.2 marked stable, there is no need to keep talking about > ext4 as if it's something experimental. > > 2. The handbook should mention that a separate small /usr/portage > partition can noticeably improve performance for users with a rotational > hard drive, and that it's not needed for solid-state drives. It should > also mention that using Gentoo with a separate /usr/portage partition > will require some additional configuration (such as changing DISTDIR and > PKGDIR to avoid running out of space). > > -Alexandre. > >
