Did we must put the mounted partition '/' and '/boot' in the same slice ?

Alex Zbyslaw xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Thu Jul 7 17:27:45 GMT 2005


Shark Wang wrote:

>I put '/boot' for an individual partition just for 1023 cylinder
>story, although FreeBSD did
>not need this action !
>
>the following is my partitions layout, pls help to do some check:
>
>ad0s1d      /boot  -> 30M
>ad0s1a      /  -> 512M
>ad0s1b      swap -> 512M
>ad0s1e      /usr -> 6144M
>ad0s1f       /var -> 512M
>ad0s1g      /home -> 2017M
>ad0s1h      /tmp  -> 512M 
>
>But after I finished my installation and reboot FreeBSD, it will not
>load sccuessfully!
>  
>
Do the install again but do not make /boot a partition.  1Gb is more 
than ample for / and /boot.  Given that you have /tmp separately, 256Mb 
would do.  I, at least, never used that much even.

/dev/ad12s1a    981527   122405   780600    14%    /

1Gb just because it's peanuts to a 200Gb disk, and I don't bother with 
/tmp separately.

For all the talk of the 1024 cylinder problem, I have never encountered 
it.  I suspect that while it was true of older hardware, that it just 
isn't the case any more.  If this is a problem, then it is just the / 
(root) partition that needs to start inside 1024 cylinders.

Apart from that, my opinion is that having swap = 2.5 * memory is still 
a reasonable rule of thumb.  You may never need it but a) it's a tiny 
fraction of your disk and b) if you expand your memory in the future you 
still have enough swap.  You must have at least as much swap as physical 
memory.  With 1Gb I put in 4Gb of swap, just because it's peanuts 
compared to a 200Gb disk.  If I double my memory, I still have plenty of 
swap.

/var depends on what this machine does.  If it is a mailserver then 512M 
is inadequate, for a home machine it's probably plenty.  If you ever 
need a crash dump from the kernel (and you may *never* need one, but if 
you do...) then you need as much free disk space as you have physical 
memory.

There was a recent thread about disk sizing (maybe a month ago?) so try 
searching the archive.

I also found this useful when clarifying my thoughts about how to 
partition a new disk:

http://keramida.serverhive.com/weblog/archives/2004-10-26/daemonizing-a-new-disk

--Alex




More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list