Joshua Saddler wrote: > On Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:49:00 +0200 > Pacho Ramos <pa...@gentoo.org> wrote: > >> Hello >> >> I am a bit surprised handbook still doesn't suggest people to >> create a separate partition for /usr/portage tree. I remember my >> first Gentoo systems had it inside / and that lead to a lot of >> fragmentation, much slower "emerge -pvuDN world" (I benchmarked it >> when I changed my partitioning scheme to put /usr/portage) separate >> and a lot of disk space lost (I remember portage tree reached >> around 3 GB of disk space while I am now running with 300MB) >> >> Could handbook suggest people to put /usr/portage on a different >> partition then? The only doubt I have is what filesystem would be >> better for it, in my case I am using reiserfs with tail enabled, >> but maybe you have other different setups. >> >> Thanks for discussing this :) > > not gonna happen, for reasons that SwifT & others already mentioned. > this is the sort of non-simple, non-trivial text/info/instructions > that would be better suited to an "optimizing your FS layout" article > on the gentoo wiki, or similar.
Well, way back when I first installed Gentoo, I actually read some before I even started. I learned through all that reading that /, /boot, /home, /usr, /usr/portage and /var are best on their own partition. Each of those are for different reasons. The root partition is obvious, I would hope anyway. ;-) The boot partitions comes in handy if you don't automount it or have more than one distro installed. Home is obvious. People recommended /usr because it could a) be mounted read only and b) it can be enlarged if needed since it tends to grow a lot. Portage since it is tons of small files and tends to fragment a lot. The var partition is so that if some error message repeats itself overnight and fills up the partition it at least doesn't lock up the whole system. I actually had this one happen to me once. For some reason, even logrotate didn't catch it, tar up and delete the old ones. I woke up to a mess that only going to single user would fix. The best thing I did was to have /var on its own partition. When people are planning to install Gentoo and they have not done at least some research, I think they should get to keep the pieces. Installing Gentoo is not something to do on a whim. It should be planned and thought through even if the person is completely new to Gentoo. I read up for at least a month before ever even starting. I agree with having a simple manual for the folks that want to install just to look and then have a separate manual, wiki even, for more serious set ups. This can include things like RAID, LVM and having more than a couple partitions. Of course, Gentoo is almost endless in options. Back to my hole. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--quiet-build=n"
