Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2021 12:51:13 +0100 From: Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf@riseup.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> Subject: Re: Partitioning Message-ID: <20210213125113.3b3f1f8b@archlinux> In-Reply-To: <20210213045614.71f2202b.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <CAAwGzWvpKnNga60ywPRj1J4rN_CJkcGwboTkcaTwoNrRC6HBhA@mail.gmail.com> <055e547a-c57a-048e-5458-4cf60b31ca7a@gmail.com> <20210213045614.71f2202b.freebsd@edvax.de>
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To me (no server, just a desktop PC) partitioning is most useful to keep track of data locations. IMO it's better to have a separated partition to e.g. store photos and to use paths only to sort photos on this partition, not to distinguish mail, documents etc. from photos. On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 04:56:14 +0100, Polytropon wrote: >If you have things like /tmp, /var/log, /home and so rooted in >the same partition, a "runaway process" could fill your whole >disk just writing to /tmp, and you wouldn't know, because a log >file can no longer be written. Also users might be affected and >cannot save their work files as /home runs out of space (simply >because / is full). OTOH if you don't know how much space you need for binaries and libraries and how much space you need for data in home in the future, you are less flexible and might need to resize partitions, if they are separated. By the all-in-one approach you don't have to do this. Btw. making tmp a tmpfs has some pros and less cons ;). >Another useful thing about partitioning is that you can backup >and restore partition-wise. That is useful, especially for huge amounts of data, that are better stored on a separated partition, instead of home. >You can also use different mount options (such as noatime where you >don't need it, and even noexec when you want to prevent accidental >executions). For hysterical raisins I mount some audio real-time usage related partitions with noatime, but I doubt that it make much sense nowadays. However, I agree that separated partitions are useful for measures such as mounting read only etc.. Related to performance I suspect that it only makes a difference in some cases and if so, it's probably more important what kind of hardware is used ... SMR, SSD etc.... what kinds of files are used, mainly many short or a few large or whatsoever files .... IOW related to performance the hardware and chosen file system might be more important in the first place, than mount options in the second place. >if you need to recover something from /home, you can leave /usr, /tmp, >and /var out of scope entirely, and those partitions won't be >subject to recovery attempts - you can concentrate on /home. Depends on the backup strategy, dump, dd vs tar. >The initial question probably was UFS-centered, as with using >ZFS, you can resize partitions any time you want, and it's a lot >easier to manage them. Everything mentioned above can easily be >done with ZFS, and more. Reminds me of an Ubuntu user who wanted to shrink an partition on an external USB SSD that was preformatted with exFAT. The user wanted to use it to share data between Linux and Mac. So apart of being unable to resize the partition, it also was missing "traditional Unix permissions", which other than journaling could be preserved when sharing data between those two operating systems. Thinking of managing trim support, I don't know if using an external SSD via USB is wise at all.
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