On Fri, 10 Aug 2012 10:25:51 -0400 Allan Gottlieb <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote:
> I am getting a new laptop from dell that will dual boot windows (in > case I need dell maintenance) and gentoo (real work). I have done > this often, but there are three new aspects this time. > > 1. ssd. > 2. new udev (/usr part of boot partition?) > 3. grub2. I have one of those. But I decided to stick with traditional DOS partitioning style and grub instead of GPT and grub2. > My plan 1s to have / + /usr one partition and boot from it. All else > (/tmp, /var, /home, /opt) would be lvm2. dracut would not be used. That's OK. Lately I put /usr on / anyway, I figure 1980 was 32 years ago and I don't *actually* need ultra-minimal rescue systems anymore. I keep /opt on / too for the same reasons, and that the stuff I use in /opt never changes. > > The laptop will have a 256GB ssd. Can I partition it the same as I > would have for an hd? Are there extra alignment considerations? I don't know of any special partition considerations. Just start at the 1M mark and align on 4096 like you would for spinning disks. What you will need is TRIM support and for that you use ext4. Just add "discard" to the mount options for the ext4 volumes. You also don't need an IO scheduler - ssd access is random like RAM, no heads moving in and out so no sector ordering to worry about. Configure the scheduler as NOOP in kernel config if all drives are ssd's > The gentoo-wiki page for grub2 mentions an "official article" for > grub2 (dev.gentoo.org/~scarabeus/grub-2-guide.xml) that > describes both mbr- and efi-based systems. Using efi and gpt have > advantages but the configuration described involves an efi partition > /boot having a FAT format. I was hoping to avoid dracut and have all > of / + /usr on the boot partition. Does this mean I should use the > mbr-based installation? Unless I'm mistaken, Windows still does not boot from GPT disks (maybe 8 is different). If that is indeed the case, then you do need to stik with mbr for now. Check what Google finds about your chosen Windows version's boot needs. That will tell you what you need to od. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
