123
What are the best practices to partition a linux system with? (lemm.ee)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
64 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 30 points 3 years ago (5 children)

One small /boot which is also my EFI system partition.

And a partition for / which covers all the rest of the drive.

Partitioning only limits flexibility. At some time you will regret your choice of partition sizes.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 10 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago*

    I dan't know if this is still valid but I used to be told to have different partitions for your system, logs and data (home directories) .. and have the swap-partition located in between them. This was to limit the distance the head has to move when reading from your system starts swapping.

    But if you use a SSD drive, that is not valid anymore of course :-)

    Kr.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Nowadays you don't even need a /boot unless you're doing full disk encryption and I actually recommend keeping /boot on / if you're doing BTRFS root snapshots. Being able to include your kernel images in your snapshots makes rollbacks painlessly easy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    UEFI forum made it a requirement for motherboard constructors (hp, dell, msi...) to make their UEFI implementation to be able to at least read fat(12/16/32) filesystems. That is why you need a fat(12/16/32) partition flagged ESP (efi system partition) for holding your boot files.

    So, I dont think you can do that unless you fall back to the old outdated BIOS or you have some *nix filesystem in your uefi implementation which I dont trust.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    You're only partially correct. /boot doesn't have to also be your EFI partition. In fact, most distros by default will separate the two, with the EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi and /boot being a separate ext4 based partition. My suggestion is that, if you're running BTRFS, you should merge /boot and / as one partition. You're still free to have a FAT32-based EFI mounted at /boot/efi or better yet /efi.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I use systemd-boot and my mount point is /efi. /efi/EFI/ is where my bootloaders live.

    If I rollback to an old enough snapshot, I have to reinstall my kernels from a chroot. It'd be cool if I could get around that.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It has been a while since I used grub that I forgot tgat esp could only be used to hold the boot files residing on /boot/efi.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I am guessing you're on systemd-boot? Yeah, one of the reasons why I hesitate to use it is how it requires EFI contain the kernel images. I am currently using refind.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago

    That is why one small (512Mib) ESP and one BTRFS partition occupying the rest of my drive is my go, I can isolate the root (/), var and home partitions using subvolumes.

    Users who distro hope may need a separate /home partition.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [+] -6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Aaaand your server just crashed because of a spammy log. You lost the company $222 million overnight, the database is corrupt, and every 9 minutes the company looses another $1 million.

    Good job.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    systemd resets the logs when they get big, this isn't the 2000s anymore. But if you want to limit the size of /var/log, any modern filesystem has disk quotas per-directory

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [+] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •