[Gllug] To partition or not to partition

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:36:33AM +0100, John Hearns wrote:
> 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.

OK, but none of the above seems to have anything to do with separate
/usr, which is what the original thread is about.  No one is
suggesting that /opt, /usr/local, /tmp or /var must be on the same
filesystem.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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