Best Filesystems?

[Steve]

On 8/10/05, CLIFFORD ILKAY <clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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

Clifford,

Thanks for the detailed response, especially regarding logical
volumes. The biggest risk I've always seen in many partitions, is
wasting space (in the beginning) to not having enough space on a
particular partition after a period of time. Being able to shrink or
grow a logical volume as needed would alleviate that worry.

-Steve.
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