[Gllug] What are the best practices for Linux partitioning & Mount points for Production systems

[Andrew Farnsworth]

/boot is put in the first few cylinders because it used to be that the boot
loaders could not access it past a certain point.  Once disks grew larger
than this size, it became an issue.  This led to the default behavior of
placing it first on the disk which let the older boot loaders load it
correctly even on a larger disk.  By maintaining this practice, you make it
possible to boot off even an OLD "liveCD" or install disk set and pass
parameters that will cause your system to load from the hard drive even
after booting from the (gasp) floppy or CD.

Andy

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 2:54 PM, Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 01:33:12PM +0000, Nix wrote:
> > On 2 Mar 2012, Andrew Farnsworth stated:
> >
> > > I have not noticed a significant performance difference in disk access
> > > speeds relating to the external vs internal tracks on a platter.
> >
> > There is a significant difference, often as much as a factor of two.
> > This is inevitable: the outside tracks of the disk have a higher linear
> > velocity than the inside, so given a constant data density there's more
> > room to cram in more sectors. (It is possible to reduce the data density
> > and use a constant sectors/track across the whole disk, but that went
> > out in the early 90s: it costs too much space.)
>
> Interesting ... a default install tends to put /boot in the first few
> cylinders,
> something that is not used after boot.
> Looking at a machine where the rest of the disk is given to LVM where other
> partitions are found I see:
>    RFS   0 to 255
>    /tmp  256 to 767
>    /www  768 to 1791
>    swap  1792 to 2303
>    /var  2304 to 4303
>    /usr  4304 to 5327
>
> How to organise them ? From out to in perhaps: /www /var /tmp /usr RFS
> swap.
> Roughly in order of most used.
> * The machine should never swap.
> * RFS - a few files will be used a lot, but they are only read & will end
> up in buffer cache
>
> Hmm, food for thought.
>
> BTW: I assume that the low numbered extents reported by lvdisplay --maps &
> by fdisk means
> to wards the outside of the disk.
>
> --
> Alain Williams
> Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT
> Lecturer.
> +44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
> Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information:
> http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
> #include <std_disclaimer.h>
> --
> Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
> http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20120306/91f56086/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
--
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug