Best Filesystems?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Hi,

On August 10, 2005 11:12, Steve wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a question about filesystem types. I've got an 80GB drive
> that I'm planning to reformat and install Ubuntu. I plan to create
> 3 partitions:
>
> 9.0 GB - For the OS and system files.
> 512 MB - SWAP (equal to amount of RAM)
> 70 GB - For user data files which will include many MP3s, OGGs and
> a few DVD rips (ie. mostly single large files > 1MB each)

I think putting all the OS and system files in one big partition is a 
poor choice when you have room to spare on your disk. I typically 
have the following partitions:

/boot - 100M ext2, ro, nomount - no need for journalling if you don't 
mount the filesystem. The kernel is loaded before filesystems are 
mounted so whether this filesystem is mounted or not makes no 
difference.

/ - 300M ext3 - more than enough

For the rest, I use logical volumes because it gives me the maximum 
flexibility. With conventional partitions, it is difficult to find 
the sweet spot for partition size. I always found myself either 
having too little or too much space. Using logical volumes gives me 
the ability to resize filesystems and volumes to find the optimal 
balance.

swap - whatever size you need it to be. There is no hard and fast rule 
like in Windows where you have to make it X times the size of 
physical RAM. If you have loads of RAM, you do not need as much swap. 
If you do not have very much RAM, you may find it useful to have much 
more.

/usr - size depends entirely on the machine - minimal installs, I 
allocate 300M, ext3. A development machine which has a full blown GUI 
and loads of developer tools might be 4GB. I can then mount /usr as 
ro and remount as rw if I need to install more software later.

/usr/local - optional, mounted ro if present. If you have things that 
you are installing from tarball and want to preserve them if you do a 
reinstall/upgrade, you may want to have this as a separate partition.

/var - 400M, ext3, rw

/tmp - ext2 100M, rw on a personal machine, larger on a multiuser 
server - Who cares about journalling temp files? Note, this will be 
much too small for VMWare. VMWare's needs for temp file space grows 
over time as you run the virtual machine so it is difficult to 
estimate what it should be. VMWare Knowledgebase article 844 outlines 
some strategies for dealing with this. I installed VMWare in my home 
directory. I added: tmpDirectory = "/home/cilkay/vmware/tmp" 
to /etc/vmware/config. Since /home is huge, I never ran out of temp 
space on VMWare again.

/home - as big as you want it to be, ext3, rw.

With LVM, there is little reason to soak up every bit of disk space 
right off the bat as you might do with conventional partitioning. You 
can leave unallocated space in the volume group and grow the volumes 
and filesystems as necessary down the road.

My objective with all the partions is to isolate those things that 
change from those things that do not and to only mount those things 
which change as rw.

> My question is which filesystems would be optimal? I'm used to
> ext3, but would ReiserFS be better for the OS/system files? Is ext3
> best for the large data files or ext2 or ReiserFS? If I
> occasionally boot from a liveCD I'd need to be able to have full
> access (R/W) to files on the 70GB partition.

ext3 seems to be a safe but lower performance choice. I've used 
ReiserFS and have not had any problems with it. Some swear by it 
while others swear at it. According to the Gentoo docs, XFS is 
inappropriate for machines which do not have fast disk arrays and are 
not connected to a UPS.

> Also, I will be using VMware 5.0 with windowsxp as Guest OS. Does
> anyone know if windows in VMware needs to be installed on a
> FAT/NTFS partition? As it is all virtual, I am assuming it can be
> installed on a linux filesystem.

You can create the virtual machine on any Linux filesystem. You then 
create whatever filesystems you need for the target OS within that 
VM.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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