[Gllug] Partitioning (was starting X)

[Jim Cheetham]

At 09:43 19/07/2001 +0100, Alex wrote:
>Which you're backing up anyway. If you're using
>something like Reiser, you're not going to suffer from filesystem corruption
>anyway.

I don't know if I'd trust that 100%, but it's definitely better than the 
long fsck lottery :-)
Modulo the /home argument to protect against OS upgrade/replace issues, the 
rest of this is interesting ...

>Partitioning, to me, is a poor solution for every problem which it's used to

Everything I've read, every system I've seen/configured/whatever, has 
bought in to the partitioning philosophy. Even the FHS (Filesystem 
Hierarchy Standard) http://www.pathname.com/fhs/  fits into this assumption 
by "specifying guiding principles for each area of the filesystem" - i.e. 
viewing the whole filesystem as consisting of areas with different 
functional requirements.

This may be a symptom of putting the cart before the horse, however. 
Perhaps we've grown up thinking that filesystems need different 
(contigious) areas because partitioning is our tool to enforce that. I 
guess it would be possible to allow these functional areas to instead be 
viewed as attributes of the files/directories themselves ... i.e. although 
it might be handy to mount a read-only file system (partition), this is 
just an administrative short-cut for the equivalent action of marking all 
the files as read-only.

So, I understand your enumeration of issues with partitioning, below, but 
do you have any more arguments about the use of a single space, rather than 
just objections to the practice of partitioning? Perhaps objections to the 
theory (rather than practice)?
Otherwise it would be easy to address each of your objections in turn and 
dilute the whole point you're raising ... :-)

-jim

>solve. Originally, partitioning was more to do with making disk spaces that
>the BIOS and/or OS could handle in terms of size when big disks came along -
>it's a bodge. Partitioning different areas to allow different rights makes a
>little sense, but still isn't a great solution - it inflicts discreteness on
>a logically continuous area, and you have the problems of having space on
>some areas but not others, the problems of copying between filesystems, etc.
>I much prefer the uniformity of a single / filesystem, because I don't get
>pockets of space, and I don't get problems moving things around. My gut
>feeling is that / is a logical area, and shouldn't be affected by the actual
>physical arrangement of disks (I think this is going to be something we see
>less of in the future too, with features like union mounts, etc., making the
>filesystem a bit more cohesive).
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alex.


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