| 1 |
On Tuesday 27 March 2012 14:34:03, Alexandre Rostovtsev wrote: |
| 2 |
> On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 20:01 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote: |
| 3 |
> > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 07:49:00PM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote: |
| 4 |
> > > I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to create a |
| 5 |
> > > separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my first Gentoo |
| 6 |
> > > systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of fragmentation, much |
| 7 |
> > > slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked it when I changed my |
| 8 |
> > > partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage) separate and a lot of disk |
| 9 |
> > > space lost (I remember portage tree reached around 3 GB of disk space |
| 10 |
> > > while I am now running with 300MB) |
| 11 |
> > > |
| 12 |
> > > Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different |
| 13 |
> > > partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be better |
| 14 |
> > > for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled, but maybe you |
| 15 |
> > > have other different setups. |
| 16 |
> > |
| 17 |
> > To be honest, I don't think it is wise to describe it in the Gentoo Handbook |
| 18 |
> > just yet. I don't mind having it documented elsewhere, but the separate |
| 19 |
> > partition is not mandatory for getting Gentoo up and running. The |
| 20 |
> > instructions currently also just give an example partition layout and tell |
| 21 |
> > users that different layouts are perfectly possible. |
| 22 |
> > |
| 23 |
> > We need to take into consideration what is needed (must) for a Gentoo |
| 24 |
> > installation, what is seriously recommended (should), what is nice to have |
| 25 |
> > (could), etc. And for me, having a separate /usr/portage is a nice-to-have |
| 26 |
> > imo. |
| 27 |
> |
| 28 |
> The partitioning scheme is something that the user needs to decide on |
| 29 |
> *before* getting Gentoo up and running. After the user had finished |
| 30 |
> installing the operating system, it's too late to inform him about the |
| 31 |
> advantages of a separate /usr/portage. |
| 32 |
|
| 33 |
It does not have to be a separate *physical* partition. It could be set |
| 34 |
up as a loop device without any real downsides: |
| 35 |
|
| 36 |
/usr/portage/tree.ext4 /usr/portage/tree ext4 loop,noatime 0 0 |
| 37 |
|
| 38 |
An advantage is that it can be easily resized if necessary. |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
> IMHO, chapter 4 of the handbook needs the following changes: |
| 41 |
> |
| 42 |
> 1. ext4, not ext3, needs to be recommended as the default filesystem. We |
| 43 |
> have kernel 3.2 marked stable, there is no need to keep talking about |
| 44 |
> ext4 as if it's something experimental. |
| 45 |
> |
| 46 |
> 2. The handbook should mention that a separate small /usr/portage |
| 47 |
> partition can noticeably improve performance for users with a rotational |
| 48 |
> hard drive, and that it's not needed for solid-state drives. It should |
| 49 |
> also mention that using Gentoo with a separate /usr/portage partition |
| 50 |
> will require some additional configuration (such as changing DISTDIR and |
| 51 |
> PKGDIR to avoid running out of space). |
| 52 |
> |
| 53 |
> -Alexandre. |
| 54 |
> |
| 55 |
> |
Archives