Colin wrote: > Just some questions about partitioning and filesystems... my boot > partition (/dev/hda1) will be ext3, and I've got a gig of swap > (/dev/hda2). Then what? >
You are on the right track. 10G should be good enough for most system partitions, just keep on eye on /usr/portage/distfiles to make sure it doesn't consume all of the space on your root volume. And reiserfs is the best choice for '/'. I would also suggest making a /var partition or LVM volume of 2-5GB. /var serves as the gentoo build space, as well as temporary file space. Thus the /var directory will experience a lot of file creations, modifications, and deletions, so it is best to keep it isolated from the rest of the system to cut down on fragmentation. This filesystem should also be reiserfs, for performance reasons. You might also create a /tmp partition of 1-2G. As for the media space (I'll call it /media), I don't think it particularly matters what filesystem you choose here. It doesn't sound like you will have more than a few thousand files there, and they will not be updated very often, so xfs, reiserfs, and ext2/3 are all suitable choices. Access time and throughput are not usually a problem for these types of files due to system and application buffering, so I would suggest /media be placed last on the disk so it occupies the inside (and slowest) cylinders. FYI, I have most of my media files on an external 4200rpm USB2 drive. The rest of the disk should probably be /home, and again, I doubt you will be able to notice a difference in the various filesystems for this space. You could combine /media and /home, but then you can't really mount it read-only. [Slightly Off Topic] With the current journaled filesystems for linux, it really doesn't make sense to talk about 'data-integrity'. Corrupted files are just as possible on reiserfs, xfs, jfs, and ext3 as they were on ext2. This is because, AFAIK, all of the current filesystems journal the filesystem meta-data only, so if the system crashes, the filesystem can repair itself. The filesystem makes no guarantees about repairing the files it contains. Reiser4 is one of the first to attempt file data journaling as well, but AFAICT, it is still fairly unstable. -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
