Gentoo Archives: gentoo-desktop

From: Daniel Gryniewicz <dang@g.o>
To: gentoo-desktop@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-desktop] disk partitioning
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:22:25
Message-Id: 1170778757.6575.10.camel@athena.fprintf.net
In Reply to: [gentoo-desktop] disk partitioning by Mikko Husari
1 On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 09:26 +0200, Mikko Husari wrote:
2 > hi!
3 >
4 > i was wonderin (also tried my luck on perfomance-gentoo,
5 > but no one home), what kind of partition + fs table would
6 > be optimal on server and/or desktop. afaik, /usr/portage
7 > would be on its own partition, and perhaps reiserfs and raid0.
8 > distfiles should be on a different partition, so it would
9 > not be in the way of portage itself... but, what about other
10 > parts of gentoo/linux. and is journaling filesystem over
11 > striping raid just asking for trouble?
12 >
13
14 In general, reiserfs is considered dead by the linux kernel guys, and by
15 it's last remaining maintainer in particular (see
16 http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/ for his email...) So, you probably want ext3 at this point. There will be an upgrade path from ext3 to ext4, when ext4 is stable.
17
18 Running a journaled filesystem is completely orthogonal to the
19 underlying storage. You always want a journal on large filesystems,
20 because otherwise you will have huge (linear with the size of the
21 filesystem) fsck times. In addition, a journaled FS is safer than a
22 non-journaled one, w.r.t. data loss.
23
24 Putting /usr/portage on it's own filesystem shouldn't make a huge
25 difference in performance, especially if it's on the same spindles as
26 other filesystems. /usr/portage is a high access file tree, with the
27 sole exception of syncing. Other than that, it's relatively low access.
28 Things like "emerge -auvDN world" hit the metadata cache fairly hard,
29 but that cache is designed to be fairly quick. So, putting /usr/portage
30 on it's own filesystem will generally only make your system less
31 flexible (even if you use LVM2, which you *definitely* should do).
32
33 Personally, I run RAID5 on my system, rather than striping. It's almost
34 as fast as striping on all modern systems, and has the huge advantage of
35 being able to recover from disk failure (of which I've had 2 on that
36 system over time). With striping, if a disk goes, you lose everything.
37
38 Personally, my partition table looks like this:
39
40 /boot - 100M (or 100M + 2 * memory, if I use a swapfile)
41 swap - 2 * memory (if I don't use a swapfile)
42 / - 10G
43 /home - The rest
44
45 Except my file server, which has
46 /home - 10G
47 /storage - the rest
48
49 I do put PORTAGE_TMPDIR in /home/portage, tho, because that can take
50 large amounts of disk over time.
51
52 Daniel
53
54 --
55 gentoo-desktop@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-desktop] disk partitioning Mikko Husari <husku@×××××.net>
Re: [gentoo-desktop] disk partitioning Lindsay Haisley <fmouse-gentoo@×××.com>