Hi all, there is no need to CC me as I am reading this list :-) Robert Schiele wrote :

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 01:18:53PM +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

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The problem with this is that it's difficult to come up with a general solution for partitioning that works for everybody. The questions are what to do in case of a new installation with unpartitioned disks and what with partitioned ones? If somebody comes up with a verbal algorithm on how to handle the general problem, I'll get our partitioner team on board for discussion. Does anybody have such general algorithm?

I think the most general algorithm is: "This damn partitioner should always exactly propose what I expect him to propose in any arbitrary situation! Ah, and by the way it should double the disk space on every installation time." --- You will add this to the feature list for 10.1, won't you? ;-)

As the proposer of this item I think YaST should indeed come up with "Do the right thing (tm)" ;-). In first instance YaST should know about "Usage-Profiles". The follwing examples are just what they are and subject to talk about. These examples could apply on systems with already partitioned HDDs as well. a) Standard-Usage (2 HDDs unformatted) /dev/hda /dev/hda1 /boot 100M /dev/hda2 swap (2 times RAM) /dev/hda3 / (Rest of hda) /dev/hdb /dev/hdb1 /home (complete disk space) /home should always be mounted on the HDD with the most available disk space to my intention. b) Advanced-Usage (3 HDDs unformatted) /dev/hda /dev/hda1 /boot 100M /dev/hda2 swap (2 times RAM) /dev/hda3 / (Rest of hda) /dev/hdb /dev/hdb1 /home (complete disk space) /dev/hdc /dev/hdc1 /opt (50% of disk space) /dev/hdc2 /usr (Rest of hdc) /home should always be mounted on the HDD with the most available disk space to my intention. c) Server-Usage (4 HDDs unformatted) /dev/hda /dev/hda1 /boot 100M /dev/hda2 swap (2 times RAM) /dev/hda3 / (Rest of hda) /dev/hdb /dev/hdb1 /home (complete disk space) /dev/hdc /dev/hdc1 /opt (50% of disk space) /dev/hdc2 /usr (Rest of hdc) /dev/hdd /dev/hdd1 /var (complete disk space) /home should always be mounted on the HDD with the most available disk space to my intention. bis dahin/kind regards Martin Mewes -- Sicherheitsmeldungen fuer SuSE Linux bekommt man hier: suse-security-announce@suse.com

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 03:39:18PM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

Unless $PLACE_TO_DUMP_LARGE_FILES!=/home. I regularly compile packages from source and I have /storage for tarballs (and openSUSE .ISOs) and /sources for unpacked sources. That keeps fragmentation on both file systems low and /home is free of clutter and can be backed up easily.

I also have data on seperate places. I have 5 HD's. I am sure here is NO good solution for this problem as each person is different. Something I miss (well not personally) is a /data in FAT32 for people who dualboot. In ~/ there could be a link to /data My personal first concern would however still go out to a seperate /home houghi -- Quote correct (NL) http://www.briachons.org/art/quote/ Zitiere richtig (DE) http://www.afaik.de/usenet/faq/zitieren Quote correctly (EN) http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html

houghi wrote:

My personal first concern would however still go out to a seperate /home

for me, a separate /var is as important as a separate /home, but then, I came from a solaris on server background where you tend to create more partitions. I've never used the default suse partitions, and see it a sign of newbieness to have just / and swap, and when I first installed SuSE it actually made me wonder whether it was a serious OS! I'd say for automagic partition sizing /var = minimum 256MB rising proportionately to maximum 2G, depending on disk size /home = minimum 64MB rising proportionally with disk space maximum 50% of disk *only* if there's no room for these partition sizes should they be omitted - e.g. if say installing onto a 1GB flash memory card or something. I'd also like to see an advanced option for "noatime". Paul

Hi Carl, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote :

Please don't take the following criticism personally, it's only my part of the discussion and I could be wrong.

That's why we discuss it ;-) I could be wrong either ...

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a) Standard-Usage (2 HDDs unformatted)

This is not standard at all. I would say that all cases with unformatted disks are something only an advanced user sees. Another problem is that you specify 2 HDDs as standard. By that definition, any laptop would be sub-standard.

My intention was to create a Standard for machines with more than one hdd. To my intention machines with only one hdd are discussed within "[opensuse] Feature wishlist: Comment on  Separate partitions for /root and /home directories as installation default" Message-ID: ... So "Standard" here means a profile for a machine with two hdds.

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c) Server-Usage (4 HDDs unformatted)

/dev/hda /dev/hda1 /boot 100M /dev/hda2 swap (2 times RAM)

Why does everybody want swap to be twice the RAM size? There is no reason for that. Besides that, having swap on a disk which is mostly inactive will help. So moving swap to the disk with /var and /tmp makes sense.

Maybe I am blind and maybe my knowledge here is rather old, but someday someone said that "a good choice for swap-size is to double the amount of RAM". I agree that swap can move to a hdd which is mostly inactive.

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/dev/hda3 / (Rest of hda)

/dev/hdb /dev/hdb1 /home (complete disk space)

Add /dev/hdc to /home by using RAID or using it for backups.

Cool :-)

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/dev/hdc /dev/hdc1 /opt (50% of disk space) /dev/hdc2 /usr (Rest of hdc)

Disagree. Useless waste of space. And it will slow down booting.

You see, my knowledge about the FHS is low. Thanks for pointing this out.

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/dev/hdd /dev/hdd1 /var (complete disk space)

Now that is an idea which makes some sense. However, I would split that disk into /tmp and /var, each taking half of it.

OK I second that.

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/home should always be mounted on the HDD with the most available disk space to my intention.

Unless $PLACE_TO_DUMP_LARGE_FILES!=/home. I regularly compile packages from source and I have /storage for tarballs (and openSUSE .ISOs) and /sources for unpacked sources. That keeps fragmentation on both file systems low and /home is free of clutter and can be backed up easily.

I second that as well ... Now let's see what others have to say. bis dahin/kind regards Martin Mewes -- Oberhalb der Kulminationspunkte forstwirtschaftlicher Bestaende tendieren die Dezibelwerte gegen den Nullpunkt. http://www.larsschuette.de/ -> Klugscheisser ;-)

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 10:44:57AM +0200, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

You're not blind, but the information is based on a problem in the virtual memory subsystem which has been fixed in late 2.2 kernels, so it shouldn't even apply to debian anymore. For software suspend, you may want at least RAM size for swap if your machine is really loaded, but for the non-suspend case you're free to pick any size (even some value above 2 GB). I'm using 512 MB RAM and 256 MB swap and even suspend works just fine for me.

Sure it does work but is it also efficient? If you don't have enough swap space for all virtual pages that are not mapped to background storage on a regular filesystem then you have more I/O than you would have if you could keep all pages that ever were swapped out on background storage (at least as long as you don't write to the respective pages). Obviously the rule to double the RAM is just a more or less random criteria and if you have too less swap space it might be even more smart to ommit the swap partition at all (unless you need it for suspend-to-disk). A more general rule could be: The more memory you have the more value you can gain by a large swap partition and the larger your disks are the cheaper it is for you to have a large swap partition. But if you want to guess a useful partition size for the swap partition you _have_ to fill this algorithm with some (somewhat) useful numbers. Robert -- Robert Schiele Tel.: +49-621-181-2214 Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker mailto:rschiele@uni-mannheim.de

Hello, Am Dienstag, 27. September 2005 19:02 schrieb Martin Mewes:

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote : [...]

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/dev/hdd1 /var (complete disk space)

Now that is an idea which makes some sense. However, I would split that disk into /tmp and /var, each taking half of it.

OK I second that.

Another way would be to symlink /tmp -> /var/slash_tmp - this provides a more flexible solution. Unfortunately, large files in /tmp also fills the /var diskspace (and the other way round) which could block too much services. On the other hand: if somebody wants to fill up /var, he can use /var/tmp... Regards, Christian Boltz --

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Wozu braucht root einen Browser? Fürs Internet? *wuuhahaha* Der Tag faengt echt gut an... Gleich so ein Highlight am Morgen, herrlich... [> Marcel Stein und Thomas Hertweck in suse-linux]

Am Dienstag, 27. September 2005 17:55 schrieb Andreas Jaeger:

Robert Schiele writes:

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On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 01:18:53PM +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

Hi,

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Does anybody have such general algorithm?

I think, it is impossible to decide what's right for the user. A home-user, who installs linux "just for fun" is quite right with one swap and one root partition. Most of them have only one hd and also windows on it. If they look in the diskmanager of windows and see lots of partitons they get confused. And to backup the home directory before you reinstall is not dificult. To have a separate /home partition is not always a good thing, sharing ~/.kde between SuSE 10.0 and Debian Sarge may work, but sharing between SuSE 10.0 and SuSE 8.2 will get you in trouble. Also sharing ~/.profile between different distros will give you suprising results. If you do a server install, it's up to the usage what's the right partitioning schema. Somebody mentioned a 2GB /var parition earlier in this thread: if you have e.g. a webserver with a database backend you need much more space on /var! And remember, regardless what size your partitions are, at least one of them is too small...

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I think the most general algorithm is: "This damn partitioner should always exactly propose what I expect him to propose in any arbitrary situation! Ah, and by the way it should double the disk space on every installation time."

This _is_ the best. Even windows let's the user decide, what partition to delete/recreate for installation. What about a "Inspect partition content"-Button in YaST, so you can take a look, before you kill your data. -- mdc

Am Mittwoch, 28. September 2005 12:21 schrieb jdd:

meister@netz00.com wrote:

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What about a "Inspect partition content"-Button in YaST, so you can take a look, before you kill your data. or, at least, more terminal console available with a minimal tool set? (mount, fdisk, mkfs...)

Hi jdd, these tools are available, just press CTRL-ALT-F3. But this is for people who know how to use these tools. The "Inspect partition content"-Button is for newbies and they need it... -- mdc

meister@netz00.com wrote:

This _is_ the best. Even windows let's the user decide, what partition to delete/recreate for installation. What about a "Inspect partition content"-Button in YaST, so you can take a look, before you kill your data.

Now this IS useful! -- Regards Kenneth Aar