Fewer partitions are better (Re: Disk Layout/Partitioning Practices)

[Mark Mielke]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 12:21:12PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 10:25:02AM +0100, dballester at kernpharma.com wrote:
> > and I NEED to have system data and user data in three or more physical
> > partitions ( at least /boot, / and /where_user-app_data_is ). The reason is
> Why have /boot separate from /, assuming a BIOS newer than 1998 or so?

So that if you corrupt /, you minimize the chance of ruining your boot
images (GRUB/LILO + Linux) making it difficult to recover. Actually,
this comes down to admin error sometimes as well... Personally, I make
/boot be read-only, and on some machines, I choose to not mount /boot
at all unless I plan on upgrading Linux or GRUB... You don't need the
stuff in /boot while your system is up.

If you use a file system (for /) that supports 'tail-packing', or a
file system not supported by GRUB, or an unsupported file system that
doesn't store the boot image together as a single series of blocks
with LILO, you may be _forced_ to make /boot a separate ext2/3
partition. You may not be able to boot otherwise.

My personal philosophy is to separate partitions by function. If you
only have 2 or 3 file functions, you only need 2 or 3 partitions. Note
that you can tune each partition separately. Use larger block sizes,
and fewer inodes for file systems that store movies, mp3's, etc. Use
smaller block sizes (2K) for / to boot up/application load times.
Use read-only mounts wherever possible to improve the odds that the
file system will handle your accesses efficiently, as well as to prevent
admin errors such as accidentally 'cp' or 'rm'ing critical files. Don't
bother with atime field updating for file systems that you expect to
be frequently read, and don't care when they were last read (/usr).

If you do it all on one partition, you have very few choices.

mark

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