cvs commit: src/sys/conf kern.post.mk

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:

>>> We probably ought to move this discussion to another list, but -- I 
>>> remember two very specific occasions where I first realized how 
>>> important an isolated /var is:
>>> 
>>> (1) In about 1995, when I first started using ppp, I discovered the
>>>     hard way that the default logging level was set a bit high, and filled
>>>     the entire hard disk with log records in a couple of days.
> *snip*
>> 
>> I've also hit cases where the log come in so fast that you can fill a
>> 1GB /var fast enough that newsyslog never has a chance to compress the
>> log.
> *snip*
>
> Just so that people realize: what is being described is not an argument 
> for having /var be a separate partition, but really for having /var/log 
> be a separate partition. It's just that the granularity of our thinking 
> is highly influenced by our legacy, even to the extend of it becoming an 
> intellectual jail.
>
> I think it's much easier to size a /var/log partition effectively than 
> it is to size /, /usr and /var effectively...
>
> Just some food for thought,

Yeah, I specifically mentioned /var/mqueue and /var/mail as examples of 
other components.

I agree though that what current and past state of the art has supported 
is narrowing our thinking.  If we were using a system like AFS (listen to 
the groans from the crowd who hates it when I harp on AFS!), we would 
simply allocate different volumes for the directories using the same 
back-end storage pool, and be able to administratively change the volume 
quotas at low overhead.  The traditional BSD/UNIX quota model and/or file 
system model has no way to express this sort of notion, and it's a very 
useful notion.

Robert N M Watson