Default FS Layout Too Small?

[Lawrence Stewart]

Tim Kientzle wrote:
> Craig Rodrigues wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 11:10:25AM -0800, Sean Bruno wrote:
>>
>>> I would assume that the default would be much larger now-a-days. I think
>>> a simple doubling to 1G would be sufficient.
>>
>> Is there any point these days to having sysinstall auto-default to 
>> creating
>> separate slices for /tmp, /var/, /usr........
>> when setting up new systems, I've started just ignoring the sysinstall 
>> auto-defaults and making one big / partition
>> and installing FreeBSD there....
>>
>> It seems every release we need to keep bumping up the size of
>> the sysinstall auto-defaults because they are too small.
>>
>> This bites new users.
> 
> I agree.  The "one big /" style of partitioning seems a
> much more reasonable default for most desktop/laptop users
> these days.  For server users, the separate /tmp and /var
> are pretty critical, though I doubt those folks are using
> the "A"uto layout very much, so changing the "A"uto layout
> to just allocate / and swap would seem to make sense.

When I last played around with having 1 large partition in the 6.1 days, 
it didn't actually work consistently. From memory the issue is that if 
the boot filesystem (which was on the large root partition) extended 
past a particular combination of cyl/head/sector, the machine would 
crash in the boot stage. With a 20GB disk it was fine, but a 40GB disk 
would trigger the crash.

This may have been fixed since then, but it would be worth doing some 
testing on a range of hardware before we could recommend it as an option.

Cheers,
Lawrence