Re: [gentoo-desktop] disk partitioning

[Peter Humphrey]

On Tuesday 06 February 2007 07:26:20 Mikko Husari wrote:

> i was wonderin (also tried my luck on perfomance-gentoo,
> but no one home), what kind of partition + fs table would
> be optimal on server and/or desktop. afaik, /usr/portage
> would be on its own partition, and perhaps reiserfs and raid0.
> distfiles should be on a different partition, so it would
> not be in the way of portage itself... but, what about other
> parts of gentoo/linux. and is journaling filesystem over
> striping raid just asking for trouble?

I can't get any more disks into this box, so I have the somewhat unusual 
arrangement of the two IDE disks that came with it (one of them encumbered 
with Windows), plus two SATA disks. I have most of my Linux stuff on the 
SATAs. I use mdraid to construct /dev/mdX from /dev/sd[ab]X and allocate 
them thus:

/dev/hda1 50M /root
/dev/md0 20G /
/dev/md1 16G /home
/dev/md2 32G /home/<user>/common
/dev/md3 6G /usr/local
/dev/md4 40G /srv
/dev/md5 30G /usr-bits.

Each of the four disks has a 2GB swap partition (see below re /tmp).

The common disk is for things I want whichever system I boot. /srv is for 
vmware-server images and anything else I want to serve. /usr-bits contains 
portage.

I keep a separate portage tree because this box seems to need reinstalling 
from time to time, and not having to fetch the stuff every time is useful. 
My gateway box also runs Gentoo, but of course it doesn't have anywhere 
near the number of packages in its distfiles that I need for the desktop 
box.

Following Duncan's idea, I put /tmp on tmpfs, i.e. in memory. I have it set 
to a size larger than physical RAM and let the kernel swap things when it 
needs to - rarely, that is. Only when I'm compiling a humungous package 
like Open Office. The speed-up is dramatic.

-- 
Rgds
Peter
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