Best Filesystems?

[Andrew Hammond]

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Steve wrote:
> 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.

Clifford's partition layout above is good stuff. I would also second the
notion of staying away from XFS. There are some known bugs with it. JFS
is a solid alternative (as far as we've been able to determine and we
test pretty carefully before deploying to production). Resier4 is
possibly the most exciting filesystem I've seen in a while, but I'm not
convinced it's production ready yet.

Finally, stick with LVM instead of trying EVMS. EVMS has quite a number
of problems which you will not appreciate.

- --
Andrew Hammond    416-673-4138    ahammond-swQf4SbcV9C7WVzo/KQ3Mw at public.gmane.org
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.
CB83 2838 4B67 D40F D086 3568 81FC E7E5 27AF 4A9A
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