[Techtalk] /usr Partition

[Akkana Peck]

A typical partition scheme for me (obviously it depends on disk size):

* One /boot, small (maybe 64-128M).
* Several (three or four) / partitions, 4.5-10G each.
* A swap (I'm still confused as to how big to make swap).
* One or more (see question below) huge partitions for storing
  personal stuff like source code and photos.

The point of having a separate /boot and several / partitions
is that you can try out a new distro without affecting your
current one at all. Curious about gentoo or linspire? No problem,
just install to one of the spare partitions. And as long as /boot
is its own partition, grub can keep track of all your various
installs.

Currently I'm experimenting with making the "huge partition for storing
stuff" be /home, as Val suggested. In the distant past I've had bad
problems with that, because different distros would have
incompatible versions of software (say, gnome or kde) so every
time I rebooted into a different distro I'd get seven warning
dialogs telling me my settings had been migrated from an earlier
version, or my settings included things the current version didn't
understand. I got in the habit of keeping /home on the root
partition for each distro, and making symlinks from there to
the big partition where the images/music/source is stored.
But it looks like things have gotten better and sharing /home
works a bit better now.

I've never seen any point to making /usr a separate partition from /.
(In earlier Unix days there were reasons for it, but I'm not aware
of any good reasons that apply to a modern Linux system.)

If I have several physical disks to work with, then I'll sometimes
put / and /home on separate disks (and on different IDE channels)
so that if I'm compiling, seeks in the source tree (somewhere under
/home) and in system files (the compiler and /usr/include and
/usr/lib) are done at different times. I'm not convinced this
actually makes a measurable difference in compilation time, but
it makes me feel like I'm doing something to optimize the system.

Val Henson writes:
> Unfortunately, a lot of people are still partitioning up
> their modern 60GB super fast drives running ext3 like it was 1972, and
> all it does is make for headaches when one partition or another fills
> up.

Val, I've been wanting to ask you: I remember there used to be
arguments for not making filesystems over a certain maximum size,
so if you had a big disk, it was better to break it up into several
smaller filesystems.

In these days of 160G+ disks, is it kosher to have a single 100M
filesystem?  On ext2/3 it can be a major pain because fsck takes
forever, but what about reiser? With ext3 (which I know you like
better than reiser), how important is it to fsck often?

What about swap? What's the current guideline for how much swap you
should have?

	...Akkana