partitons and proper order

partitons and proper order

[mike]

Hello,
I have installed linux a few times no real problems with my
installs. But going to move some drives around and do a fresh
install. I usually install with the below

/
swap
/boot
/var
/usr
/home
/tmp

I use ext3 and I am currently useing Mandrake distribution on an
intel compatible machine with ide drives.

My question is does the order I create the partitions matter and if
so what would be the proper order, if there is one?


Mike
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Re: partitons and proper order

[Thorsten Alge]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1697 bytes --]

Hi Mike,

the order of the partitions doesnt really matter. Only if you want to
use lilo as your bootloader you should have your /boot partition under
cylinder 1024 - if you use grub you do not need an /boot partition.

Am So, den 31.10.2004 schrieb mike um 20:22:
> Hello,
> I have installed linux a few times no real problems with my
> installs. But going to move some drives around and do a fresh
> install. I usually install with the below
> 
> /
> swap
> /boot
> /var
> /usr
> /home
> /tmp
> 
> I use ext3 and I am currently useing Mandrake distribution on an
> intel compatible machine with ide drives.
> 
> My question is does the order I create the partitions matter and if
> so what would be the proper order, if there is one?
> 
> 
> Mike
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs

mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Thorsten Alge



            
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Re: partitons and proper order

[mike]

Thorsten Alge wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> 
> the order of the partitions doesnt really matter. Only if you want to
> use lilo as your bootloader you should have your /boot partition under
> cylinder 1024 - if you use grub you do not need an /boot partition.
> 
> Am So, den 31.10.2004 schrieb mike um 20:22:
> 
>>Hello,
>>I have installed linux a few times no real problems with my
>>installs. But going to move some drives around and do a fresh
>>install. I usually install with the below
>>
>>/
>>swap
>>/boot
>>/var
>>/usr
>>/home
>>/tmp
>>
>>I use ext3 and I am currently useing Mandrake distribution on an
>>intel compatible machine with ide drives.
>>
>>My question is does the order I create the partitions matter and if
>>so what would be the proper order, if there is one?
>>
>>
>>Mike
>>-
> 
> 
> mit freundlichen Grüßen,
> 
> Thorsten Alge
> 
> 

Thanks Thorsten,
I do use lilo. I have also been running a dual boot box with M$ and
lilo has been writing to the master boot record. But this time it's
all going to be Linux. I have a 30 gig harddrive so I would assume I
would be safe if I kept the /boot partition within the first 500
megabytes of the drive.

Mike


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Re: partitons and proper order

[Ray Olszewski]

At 03:14 PM 10/31/2004 -0700, mike wrote:
>[...]
>I do use lilo. I have also been running a dual boot box with M$ and
>lilo has been writing to the master boot record. But this time it's
>all going to be Linux. I have a 30 gig harddrive so I would assume I
>would be safe if I kept the /boot partition within the first 500
>megabytes of the drive.

That's a good bet, but the mappings on modern hard drives are so hard to 
follow, and so idiosyncratic, that it's not a sure thing. It''s hard to 
figure out where the BIOS thinks track 1024 ends ... and aside from  access 
to the kernel,  know of no special benefit any partition gets from being at 
the beginning of the drive.

My practice ... which has worked 100% reliably for me with drives up to 120 
GB or so (I think I've even made it work with a 180 GB drive, and drives 
over 134 GB or so have real BIOS problems)... is to make partitions in this 
order:

hda1 = /boot
hda2 = swap
hda3 = /  (root)
hda4 = /home

I'm not partial to using separate /var, /tmp, and /usr partitions ... but 
if I were, I'd put them and /home in the extended partitions at hda5 and up.



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Re: partitons and proper order

[mike]

Ray Olszewski wrote:
> At 03:14 PM 10/31/2004 -0700, mike wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>> I do use lilo. I have also been running a dual boot box with M$ and
>> lilo has been writing to the master boot record. But this time it's
>> all going to be Linux. I have a 30 gig harddrive so I would assume I
>> would be safe if I kept the /boot partition within the first 500
>> megabytes of the drive.
> 
> 
> That's a good bet, but the mappings on modern hard drives are so hard to
> follow, and so idiosyncratic, that it's not a sure thing. It''s hard to
> figure out where the BIOS thinks track 1024 ends ... and aside from 
> access to the kernel,  know of no special benefit any partition gets
> from being at the beginning of the drive.
> 
> My practice ... which has worked 100% reliably for me with drives up to
> 120 GB or so (I think I've even made it work with a 180 GB drive, and
> drives over 134 GB or so have real BIOS problems)... is to make
> partitions in this order:
> 
> hda1 = /boot
> hda2 = swap
> hda3 = /  (root)
> hda4 = /home
> 
> I'm not partial to using separate /var, /tmp, and /usr partitions ...
> but if I were, I'd put them and /home in the extended partitions at hda5
> and up.
> 
> 

Hi Ray,

The reason I made /var a seperate partion is when I first started I
had a small drive and read somewhere that /var/log could grow so big
from logs (from miss a missconfigured system, which being a newbie's
newbie at the time could likely happen to me :-) that it could
render my system unuseable. I think I just made the others /usr,/tmp
seperate because I made /var seperate.Which is probably not needed
anymore now that I am more experienced (in some things anyways).

Thanks,
Mike




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Re: partitons and proper order

[Ray Olszewski]

At 07:45 PM 10/31/2004 -0700, mike wrote:
>Ray Olszewski wrote:
> > At 03:14 PM 10/31/2004 -0700, mike wrote:
> >
> >> [...]
> >> I do use lilo. I have also been running a dual boot box with M$ and
> >> lilo has been writing to the master boot record. But this time it's
> >> all going to be Linux. I have a 30 gig harddrive so I would assume I
> >> would be safe if I kept the /boot partition within the first 500
> >> megabytes of the drive.
> >
> >
> > That's a good bet, but the mappings on modern hard drives are so hard to
> > follow, and so idiosyncratic, that it's not a sure thing. It''s hard to
> > figure out where the BIOS thinks track 1024 ends ... and aside from
> > access to the kernel,  know of no special benefit any partition gets
> > from being at the beginning of the drive.
> >
> > My practice ... which has worked 100% reliably for me with drives up to
> > 120 GB or so (I think I've even made it work with a 180 GB drive, and
> > drives over 134 GB or so have real BIOS problems)... is to make
> > partitions in this order:
> >
> > hda1 = /boot
> > hda2 = swap
> > hda3 = /  (root)
> > hda4 = /home
> >
> > I'm not partial to using separate /var, /tmp, and /usr partitions ...
> > but if I were, I'd put them and /home in the extended partitions at hda5
> > and up.
> >
> >
>
>Hi Ray,
>
>The reason I made /var a seperate partion is when I first started I
>had a small drive and read somewhere that /var/log could grow so big
>from logs (from miss a missconfigured system, which being a newbie's
>newbie at the time could likely happen to me :-) that it could
>render my system unuseable. I think I just made the others /usr,/tmp
>seperate because I made /var seperate.Which is probably not needed
>anymore now that I am more experienced (in some things anyways).

As far as I can tell, experienced, knowledgeable people still do not share 
a consensus on this issue. In part it depends, I suppose, on the specific 
uses that a system will see. In part, perhaps, it also depends on how the 
individual weighs the relative risks of each approach. That's why I 
characterized my own practice as no more than personal perference and 
habit, not a prescription for all to follow.



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Re: partitons and proper order

[Peter]

mike@kevino.org said:
>  /boot partition within the first 500 megabytes of the drive.

20 MB would be more than enough. I have 3 kernels on my /boot and use a little 
less than 10 MB

Regards

-- 
Peter

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Re: partitons and proper order

[Ray Olszewski]

At 03:07 PM 11/1/2004 +0800, Peter wrote:

>mike@kevino.org said:
> >  /boot partition within the first 500 megabytes of the drive.
>
>20 MB would be more than enough. I have 3 kernels on my /boot and use a 
>little
>less than 10 MB

You misread this, Peter. I did not write that the partition needed to be 
500 MB large, just thet is needed to be within the first 500 MB of the 
drive. In fact, I usually make it the first partition, and make it anywhere 
from 10 to 50 MB, depending on specifics of the system (mainly, of course, 
how many different kernels I expect to have on it at any time ... normal 
systems will, as you suggest, do fine with 10 MB or even less ... also how 
big the hard disk is).




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Re: partitons and proper order

[Richard Adams]

On Monday 01 November 2004 08:07, Peter wrote:
> mike@kevino.org said:
> >  /boot partition within the first 500 megabytes of the drive.
>
> 20 MB would be more than enough. I have 3 kernels on my /boot and use a
> little less than 10 MB

For what its worth.

AFAIK the reason why we ever needed a /boot partition was a way around lilo's 
former limit of booting from a partition ( or i had better say) a kernel 
image which was placed beyond the 1023 cylinder limit of old style BIOS's.
lilo does not have that limit anymore nor do most (i think i could say "all" 
bios's) now a days. So what i am saying is the following.

Today we don't need a separate /boot partition, one may have there own reasons 
for doing so, but linuxwise, there is no reason to have one thesedays because 
the old <1023 cyl, limit is gone for ever.


> Regards

-- 
If the Linux community is a bunch of thieves because they
try to imitate windows programs, then the Windows community
is built on organized crime.

Regards Richard
pa3gcu@zeelandnet.nl
http://people.zeelandnet.nl/pa3gcu/

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Re: partitons and proper order

[simon]

hello

mike wrote:
> Hello,
> I have installed linux a few times no real problems with my
> installs. But going to move some drives around and do a fresh
> install. I usually install with the below
> 
> /
> swap
> /boot
> /var
> /usr
> /home
> /tmp
> 
> I use ext3 and I am currently useing Mandrake distribution on an
> intel compatible machine with ide drives.
> 
> My question is does the order I create the partitions matter and if
> so what would be the proper order, if there is one?

the partitions order has some effects on your disk access time...
a partition at the middle of the disk will have the best access time...
it's generaly a good idea to place the swap here...
a partition at the outside of the disk will increase the speed for long 
read/write operations... /, /usr or /home may be well placed... 
depending what you intend to do with your installation...

for more informations take a look on the multi-disk howto... even if you 
have only one disk :)

simon
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Re: partitons and proper order

[mike]

simon wrote:
> hello
> 
> mike wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>> I have installed linux a few times no real problems with my
>> installs. But going to move some drives around and do a fresh
>> install. I usually install with the below
>>
>> /
>> swap
>> /boot
>> /var
>> /usr
>> /home
>> /tmp
>>
>> I use ext3 and I am currently useing Mandrake distribution on an
>> intel compatible machine with ide drives.
>>
>> My question is does the order I create the partitions matter and if
>> so what would be the proper order, if there is one?
> 
> 
> the partitions order has some effects on your disk access time...
> a partition at the middle of the disk will have the best access time...
> it's generaly a good idea to place the swap here...
> a partition at the outside of the disk will increase the speed for long
> read/write operations... /, /usr or /home may be well placed...
> depending what you intend to do with your installation...
> 
> for more informations take a look on the multi-disk howto... even if you
> have only one disk :)
> 
> simon
> -

Hi simon,

That would be good reading for me, I will definitely have a look at
that.

Thanks,

Mike


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Re: partitons and proper order

[lindax newbie]

In generally, you want to put your most frequently used partitions
closer to the front.  Read and Write speed can be 2-3x faster at the
front of a disk than at end.
I generally go for:

/boot   (near front of disk for historical reasons, old
        BIOS's or booters)
swap   (especially if you actually "swap")
/      (static system files)
/var+tmp   (I usually make /tmp a pointer to /var/tmp2 -- they are both
       written to frequently and I figure if a crash corrupts something
       during a write command, it'll likely stay confined to 1 partition
/var/cache   #have a separate partition for squid to be happy with with
       it being located on my fastest disk to optimize web-browsing
       speed which is the slowest operation on my disk -- it being
       the slowest could also be an argument for putting it on a
       slower disk, though, as well -- but if something is in the cache
       it will speed it up, and since squid often writes to the cache
       to keep it up-to-date, I like it to be fast -- note -- I set
       all browser disk caches on all systems to as small as possible
       so they will use the squid cache more often -- with my laptop,
       for example, it's often faster to read or write something to
       a network disk than to a local disk (go figure).
/home   Yeah...email, source, compiling is all here, but I think the
       system files will oft be read more than /home files

I currently use xfs with 'noatime,nodiratime,async,numbufs=8'.  XFS is
best on large media files, Reiserfs is better at small files but seems
to have more stability problems.  I also set the 'inode' size on XFS
during file creation based on content -- I think default is 256 bytes.
However if you use the max-block size default (4k on x86 systems), your 
minimum file will take 4K, but you can set inode sizes up to 1/2 the
block size (or 2K on x86 systems) and the file system will store small 
directories, link information and maybe (not sure) small file data 
content in the inode itself thus allowing for small file storage in
the inode and no need for a separate seek to a data block (which would
be 4k in size) to read a small amount of data.

Also, xfs tries to delay writes above and beyond what the kernel does
in it's elevator algorithms so it can know what size space to look for
when looking for free space.  So if you copy data around using 'tar' or
'dd', using a high blocking value of 1-2 meg will help optimize file
layout when copying large files.  It uses a B-tree to store pointers
to sorted-by-size areas of the disk for fast allocation.

It supports multiple streams of data for a file that are useable to 
implement arbitrary system attributes as well as user-defined 
attributes.  System attributes are often used for security labeling 
under some OS's (Trusted Irix and some flavors of linux).

XFS was designed/optimized for real-time read/write of large video 
datastreams to disk for the entertainment industry, making it ideal for 
streaming or recording realtime video.  It supports formatting to 
directly make use of RAID disks so file striping will be optimally laid 
out for a specific RAID configuration - it also has support (still 
experimental, I believe, in Linux) for real-time partitions to allow for 
ultra fast read/writes without going through the file system block 
allocation layer (not that the average user would have a need for this).

Personally I just like the fact that I can make inodes up to 512-2048 in 
size to hold small bits of data that would otherwise take up to an extra 
4k block on disk.

XFS comes with a file-system re-organizer that runs by default in the
wee hours to assure optimal tuning.  The original design didn't require 
this, but some important customer had some degenerate case that could 
result in atypical fragmentation -- so the re-organizer runs in passes
at night, then it marks where it left off organizing when it quits for 
the night so when it restarts the next night, it starts organizing where 
it left off -- assuring that large terabyte disks are eventually "worked 
through", instead of only reorganizing the start of such a partition for 
2-3 hours each night.

It generally outperforms or equals performance of most of the
 journalling file systems except (in the last benchmarks I saw)
doing "rm"/unlinks of many small files.  I would guess this has to
do with 'free-space' combining that likely goes on during deletion
to ensure that contiguous free blocks are marked as single larger
blocks than multiple smaller blocks.  On my "/Share" partition that
I put files to 'share' on my internal network (like latest SuSE
rpm's, Perl CPAN source, Music or Pictures), the freespace layout
is listed as follows:
xfs_admin> freesp
   from      to extents  blocks    pct
      1       1     188     188   0.00
      2       3     256     517   0.00
      4       7      46     224   0.00
      8      15      42     486   0.00
     16      31      53    1300   0.01
     32      63      61    2944   0.01
     64     127     111   10226   0.05
    128     255     144   26433   0.13
    256     511     156   58786   0.29
    512    1023     180  131136   0.64
   1024    2047     186  272879   1.33
   2048    4095      95  265112   1.30
   4096    8191      58  347540   1.70
   8192   16383      29  342561   1.67
  16384   32767      80 1961066   9.58
  32768   65535      11  524764   2.56
  65536  131071      11 1020952   4.99
 131072  262143       7 1321298   6.46
 262144  524287      14 5959340  29.12
 524288 1048576      12 8214071  40.14
---------
    It tries to keep free space organized into the largest extents 
possible, which would explain extra cpu overhead on deleting many small 
files as their space is consolidated into larger and larger extents.


    If you have more than one hard disk, put your swap and OS on that
disk.  My "Share" partition is on one of my large but slower IDE
devices.  I use an even larger (and cheaper) 250G drive for daily
backups....

-linda



mike wrote:

>Hello,
>I have installed linux a few times no real problems with my
>installs. But going to move some drives around and do a fresh
>install. I usually install with the below
>
>/
>swap
>/boot
>/var
>/usr
>/home
>/tmp
>
>I use ext3 and I am currently useing Mandrake distribution on an
>intel compatible machine with ide drives.
>
>My question is does the order I create the partitions matter and if
>so what would be the proper order, if there is one?
>
>
>Mike
>-
>To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
>the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
>More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
>Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
>  
>
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