Re: File layout?

On Tuesday 29 October 2002 09:40 pm, Joe Brault wrote:
> Hello,
>
>     After having successfully installed Gentoo and using it for
> about 2 weeks, i've decided to start over and redo the
> partitions and change some other things...  My question is, how
> does everyone set up they're file systems?  Do u have /home on
> a separate partition, and /usr on a separate one, or everything
> on one partition?  What would be the best from a security
> standpoint?  I've seen it done alot of different ways, and
> wanted to get input from all the folks here.  Thanks for your
> time :)
>
>  - Joe :)

Welcome to Gentoo.

How many and what size hard drives? How much ram?

I follow these 'general' rules of thumb myself.

1) Swap =3D 768megs - RAM. Gentoo is currently recommending
2xRAM for swap, but some recent readings I've read and practical
experience has shown that for most people, they won't use above
512 megs of swap and RAM combined.

2) /boot =3D 32megs. Gentoo is currently recommending 100megs. I'm
not sure why this is since each kernel compiles to roughly 1meg.
I do know with other distributions, each copy of the 'kernel'=20
requires that you set aside roughly 32megs. So 100megs would
allow you to have 3 different kernels with those distributions. I
didn't understand this then and I still don't understand it. Regardless,
in Gentoo, I usually set up /boot to be only 8 or 16 megs and I've
found this to be plenty.

3) If there is only 1 hard drive, I usually set the remainder to /. If
there is more than 1 hard drive, I set the largest partition to be
either /home or /pub depending on what I'm going to do with the
computer. Then / for the rest.

Note: There is a potential performance penalty implied when you
put multiple partitions on the same drive. This is because you
force increasing distances from cylinder 0 with each partition
you create. If your second partition is swap and you are and active
user of say /pub and /pub starts halfway into your drive. Then you
set yourself up for probably excessive hard drive head travel times.
How much of a penalty hit you might experience is dependent on
many variables. I would rather avoid the issue altogether and=20
have only 1 mount point per drive.

If you have 4 drives of 10 gigs each and 128megs RAM, I'd set up
the following:

drive 1:
/boot =3D 16 megs
/ =3D remainder

drive 2:
/home =3D full drive

/drive 3:
/pub =3D full drive

/drive 4:
swap =3D 384megs
/var =3D remainder

For one of my actual multi-drive systems, I've set up the following:
(256megs RAM)

Drive 1: 8 gigs total
/boot =3D 16 megs
swap =3D 384 megs
/ =3D remainder

Drive 2: 27 gigs total
/music =3D full drive

Drive 3: 27 gigs total
/home =3D 10gigs
/pub =3D 17 gigs

Drive 4: 60 gigs total
/movies =3D total

Note that the swap partition is NOT on the same drive or
controller as the root partition.

Single drive system
(512 megs RAM)

Drive 1: 100gigs
/boot =3D 16 megs
swap =3D 128 megs
/ =3D remainder

Naturally, YMMV.

Hope this helps at least a little.

--=20
People whom think M$ software is mediocre don't know the half of it.