[COLUG] Partiton Size

[Edward Dunagin]

Hello Ohio Folks,

On Dec 10, 2007 9:17 AM, Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> wrote:
> Thomas W. Cranston wrote:
> > How much space in MB do I need to give to /boot, /, swap, and home on a
> > 10 GB partition?
>
> You forgot /usr and possibly /var.  :-)
>
> But ooh, 10MB is pretty small these days.
>
> I have my basic set of filesystems, and when I set up a new machine I look
> at how much I'm using (not allocated) on each one on other machines.
> Then I try to allocate at *least* twice that on the new machine.
>
> > /boot 100 MB
>
> Depends on how many kernels you want to have installed at once.  It sucks
> to have a kernel upgrade fail because you already have too many kernels
> in /boot.  On the two machines sitting here, one is using 369MB of a
> 494MB /boot, and the other is using 34MB of a 61MB /boot.  I like to go
> with half-gig /boot partitions.
>
> These days you can usually get away without a separate /boot, especially
> if your root isn't too huge.
>
> > / ?
>
> Depends on what other partitions you have..... if you split off /var
> and /usr, you can make root pretty small; on one of my machines it's
> 1.9GB (506 MB used), and on another it's 464MB (369MB used),
>
> > swap ? I assume 2x RAM
>
> 2x RAM is a decent rule of thumb, but it doesn't have much bearing on
> reality these days.  Unlike some 2.4 kernels and old Unix kernels, the
> current Linux kernel uses swap only as needed, rather than requiring
> twice RAM.  So if you really have enough RAM, you hardly ever use any
> swap, and not much if you do.
>
> On the other hand, Linux has this great "tmpfs" feature that creates a
> really fast filesystem in virtual memory, so the more swap you have, the
> more space can be in your tmpfs filesystems.  On my Ubuntu gutsy systems,
> there are five tmpfs filesystems before even adding /tmp as another one.
>
> > home
>
> Depends on what you'll be doing, but generally it's the biggest you can
> get away with after sizing everything else.
>
>
> I might start with something like this allocation:
>
> 256MB /boot
>   1GB /  (has config info, needs to be fairly stable)
> 2.5GB /var  (most volatile besides /home, can grow large)
>   3GB /usr  (fairly fixed size, depends on how much you want to install)
> 256MB /usr/local  (or /opt or linked to /opt, usually smallish these days)
>   2GB /home
>   1GB swap
>    -- /tmp  (tmpfs, not on disk)
>
> Or, if you want really simple:
> 1GB swap
> 9GB /

Am I missing something? When we had the smaller, least expensive hard
drives, I used to split my partitions up. But now, I have an
inexpensive 122GB H/D and do not set up any partitions and use all of
it.

Again, am I missing something?

Peace............ed

-- 
Edward Dunagin-Dunigan-Dunnigan
4646 Glenwood Drive
Bozeman, MT 59718
mobile 406-570-0992
Landline 406-556-7282
http://doas.montanalinux.org