On Mon, 2006-07-03 at 11:19 -0400, Morris, Patrick wrote:
> > Is all this partitioning stuff still being done ? I though it
> > had gone away once Linux aquired decent filesystem capabilities.
> > I've installed probably 100 systems in the past few years,
> > all with one big partition for all the /var /usr /tmp etc trees.
> > If I want separate physical disks, I just call them /home2
> > /home3 or whatever and point the applications at those paths.
> > I can't remember the last time I configured a system with
> > separate filesystems for /opt and /var
> >
> > Recent Fedora Core releases default to one big partition using LVM.
> >
> > Am I smoking crack ?
>
> As someone who has to deal with high-security systems, user quotas,
> databases, and several other fairly common things, I can tell you it
> makes my life a hell of a lot easier to split a machines disk(s) into
> separate filesystems. You can't put a quota on "/home", for example, if
> it's just a part of one big giant "/".
>
> You'll also have a hard time mounting "/usr/bin" r/o if it's part of
> "/".
>
> There are a ton of reasons people still do this, and in my experience
> it's far more common to do it than not to.
The current default is to span drives with LVM and spread everything
across it. That's a reasonable default for an installer that can't
know the machine's intended use, but probably not the best choice
if you do. Disk head motion is still the slowest common computer
operation and giving your most intense application it's own drive(s)
is one of the best ways to improve performance. I also like to
do software RAID1 mirrors of partitions for critical data so I could
recover data from any single drive after any kind of problem.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
