Re: [gentoo-desktop] disk partitioning

[Mikko Husari]

Daniel Gryniewicz wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 09:26 +0200, Mikko Husari wrote:
>
>> hi!
>>
>> 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?
>>
>>
>
> In general, reiserfs is considered dead by the linux kernel guys, and by
> it's last remaining maintainer in particular (see
> 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.
>
> Running a journaled filesystem is completely orthogonal to the
> underlying storage.  You always want a journal on large filesystems,
> because otherwise you will have huge (linear with the size of the
> filesystem) fsck times.  In addition, a journaled FS is safer than a
> non-journaled one, w.r.t. data loss.
>
> Putting /usr/portage on it's own filesystem shouldn't make a huge
> difference in performance, especially if it's on the same spindles as
> other filesystems.  /usr/portage is a high access file tree, with the
> sole exception of syncing.  Other than that, it's relatively low access.
> Things like "emerge -auvDN world" hit the metadata cache fairly hard,
> but that cache is designed to be fairly quick.  So, putting /usr/portage
> on it's own filesystem will generally only make your system less
> flexible (even if you use LVM2, which you *definitely* should do).
>
> Personally, I run RAID5 on my system, rather than striping.  It's almost
> as fast as striping on all modern systems, and has the huge advantage of
> being able to recover from disk failure (of which I've had 2 on that
> system over time).  With striping, if a disk goes, you lose everything.
>
> Personally, my partition table looks like this:
>
> /boot - 100M (or 100M + 2 * memory, if I use a swapfile)
> swap - 2 * memory (if I don't use a swapfile)
> / - 10G
> /home - The rest
>
> Except my file server, which has
> /home - 10G
> /storage - the rest
>
> I do put PORTAGE_TMPDIR in /home/portage, tho, because that can take
> large amounts of disk over time.
>
> Daniel
>
>
hmm, im really new to all that lvm stuff but i think i have a general
idea about it, does it reduce performance at all?
-- 
gentoo-desktop@g.o mailing list