more than 7 partitions on a SCSI-drive

[Garrett Cooper]

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Jeff Mohler wrote:
> Ive never understood why we still partition drives so much..its one
> spindle..sure, a hige filesystem might cause an edge performance
> issue..but..its one spindle.
> 
> / works.
> 
> ?
> 
> If there is a fundamental reason why we still partition things like we
> only have 10, 20, or 40Mb RLL. or slightly larger ESDI drives from
> back in the day..im willing to learn.
> 
> 
> 
> On 1/21/07, Christian Baer <christian.baer at uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
>> Hi folkes!
>>
>> Is there any way to do this with FreeBSD?
>>
>> Background:
>>
>> I have to admit, that I have never actually done or even tried this with
>> any OS whatsoever. I am running a two drive system with two mirrors on
>> it. Because I wanted a lot of room for /usr while /usr/home ist mounted
>> on a different partition, the second drive is filled with the two
>> mirror partitions, /usr and a swap partition. Everything else is mounted
>> on the first drive. That being: /, /temp, /var, /usr/obj and the second
>> swap partition. Together with the two mirrors this means seven (in
>> words: 7) partitions. The table looks like this:
>>
>> Filesystem              Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
>> /dev/da0a               501M     72M    389M    16%    /
>> devfs                   1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
>> /dev/da0d               1.9G    102K    1.8G     0%    /tmp
>> /dev/da1f                21G    2.9G     17G    15%    /usr
>> /dev/da0h               6.8G    742M    5.5G    12%    /usr/obj
>> /dev/da0e               4.8G     71M    4.4G     2%    /var
>> /dev/mirror/sec1.eli    9.8G    7.5M    9.0G     0%    /usr/home
>> /dev/mirror/sec0.eli     34G     21M     32G     0%   
>> /usr/home/christian
>>
>> What really sounds (and probably is) pathetic is that I have nearly 6
>> gigs of 'leftover' space on da0. Increasing the size of the mounted
>> partitions isn't really useful anymore (apart from reducing the free
>> space) as I for example probably won't be needing 2GB for /temp or more
>> than 5GB for /var - those are the sizes I have allocated now. Making /
>> any bigger than the current 512MB wouldn't bring any advances either.
>>
>> Increasing the size of the mirrors isn't an option because that would be
>> schrinking /usr. Finding a new mount point wouldn't be a problem. I was
>> thinking something along the lines of /usr/ports. /usr/src was an idea
>> at first but since I want to keep that on a different physical drive
>> than /usr/obj, the idea doesn't seem that bright anymore.
>>
>> But the
>> problem is that I can't allocate another partition, not that I ran out
>> of ideas for mount points. :-) On other machines with IDE-drives I had
>> one slice with partitions inside and never ran into this limitation
>> before. Is there any way to do something like that on SCSI-drives? We
>> are talking about SPARC64 here.
>>
>> Regards
>> Chris

	One good reason I can think of is to partition (not the tech definition
but the traditional definition, "to divide") filesystems such that if
one person fills up "/", it won't cause a program that needs to write to
"/var" or "/tmp" problems, which in the case of "/var" can bring down
entire systems and infrastructures (happened before where I was working
as IT when a CUPS server ran out of space on /var).
	Other than that.. not really sure. Maybe some of the older guard on the
list know why.
- -Garrett
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