Re: LVM1 to LVM2 plans for FC2

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On Feb  9, 2004, Paul Jakma <paul dishone st> wrote:

> Ditto, hence why stuff like /usr should not be on root. 

Yeah, and /var, etc.  I just find it too much of a hassle to keep it
all out of /.  I used to arrange things like that back in another life
as a Solaris sysadmin, but then I'd run out of partitions faster than
I'd like.  And then, reinstalling things onto a single root filesystem
is no big deal anyway.  Much simpler than having to create a bunch of
new root partitions and other LVs just to do a fresh install on the
same box.

> How do resize your root though?

Booting into another installed OS is the easiest way for me, but
there's always the rescue CD.

> Eg, I can resize /usr without rebooting.

That's something desirable, indeed.  I may considering setting up a
separate partition for /usr in the future.

> There are other benefits too, eg, the smaller and simpler root is,
> the lower the likelihood of (hopefully rare) software bugs in fs
> code hitting my root partition, statistically one would hope these'd
> be exposed in other bigger and more heavily used partitions than the
> smallest (and rarely written to) partition on the machine.

To enjoy this benefit you *really* need a separate /var too.  And
unfortunately a significant number of low-level stuff writes to /etc
and /dev (lvm and dhcp's resolv.conf munging come to mind)

> It's always been best practice to use minimal root fses, i thought?

I've always recommended minimal /boot, user stuff in a separate /home
or however you want to name it, and the OS stuff in a single
partition.  It's simple to manage, and is likely to keep the OS more
efficient in the long run; fragmenting the root filesystem into
multiple partitions tends to generate additional hard disk head
movement.  Of course the same goes for a separate /home partition, but
you really don't want to do without that!

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer