[Gllug] To partition or not to partition

[John Hearns]

On 20 October 2010 10:09, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:
>
> I _seriously_ doubt Debian will.
>
> At least, I doubt that Debian will even consider it before we have
> something like read-only-root viable, since Debian is pretty popular
> with embedded folks who really do need to be able to deal with much of
> the system being on physically read-only media.
>
> Anyway, part of the point of having /usr separate is that it imposes
> some discipline on the core system, which ensures that it will be more
> likely to boot under duress -- that sort of argument will continue to
> appeal to Debian folks long after we all have 2TB SSDs.
>

Backing up what Phil says, on big HPC clusters it is common to run
hundreds of compute nodes (blades) without any disks at all.
Root is mounted either as an nfs-root or as a RAMdisk.

On a machine I manage, / is mounted read-only NFS root and /var is
mounted as a separate mount point.
That mount point has quotas enabled  - so when one machine ran wild
over the weekend and filled its /var I had some 1am fund and games
over a remote login.

On an HPC cluster there is normally a software tree mounted on the
'head node' :  /usr/local or /opt
The same tree is mounted on all the compute nodes -so you install your
compilers, MPI Libraries and applicaiton packages into
/usr/local or /opt (or whartever) and this becomes available on the
compute nodes.

This /opt directory is ofted a completely separate partition on your
high performance NFS server or GPFS/Lustre/Panasas parallel
storage server.
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