Henrique Pantarotto wrote:
> Many of the manuals that I've read always told me to create lots of Linux
> partitions, like:
>
> swap
> / (root)
> /usr
> /home
> /var
> /boot
>
> However, I never really paid attention to this, and I have always installed
> linux with only 2 partitions: one for swap and a / (root) with all
> available space.
>
> Do I gain better performance by having many partitions?
No.
> The only reason I think for having /home in another partition is if you
> have like other HD or something. I don't think there's a point of a
> home-user with 2 gigs HD install his Linux using 5 or more partitions..
>
> Am I missing something or those manuals guys are a little dumb? ;-)
The main reasons for multiple partitions are:
1. If one of your daemons goes beserk and starts filling up one of
your logfiles, it will stop when the partition which contains the
logfile (e.g. /var or /var/log) is full. Similarly, a user can only
fill up /home.
2. You can set different mount options for the partitions. On a
carefully configured system, only /tmp, /var and /home need to be
writable (although making /etc read-only can take a bit of work).
3. Sharing filesystems via NFS. If you have lots of systems, you may
wish to mount some directories from a central NFS server. A common
configuration is to NFS-mount /usr (read-only) and /home (read-write),
either from the same server or from different servers. You can mount
the root directory via NFS (although generating a shareable /etc can
be hard work). If the client has its own hard disk, /tmp and /var
would normally be local partitions.
4. /boot is a special case, due to problems trying to access disks
with more than 1024 cylinders via a PC BIOS. /boot is normally forced
to reside within the first 1024 cylinders, so that anything in there
(i.e. the kernel and boot loader) can be accessed at boot time.
--
Glynn Clements <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
