Alan E. Davis wrote:
Thanks to advice on this list I have a reasonably stable system now, and it's time to get hands dirty. I have more GB of collected files than I can fit into my ~/ home directory, so I am planning to link several partitions to ~/ in an effort to organize this mass.
Personally I'd suggest using LVM for this, although migrating to LVM would require you to back up your current filesystems (such as creating a stage 4 as described on the gentoo-wiki), reformatting your filesystems to LVM, and then un-tarring back to the LVM system. I'm not sure if that's more work than you bargained for, but LVM has some fantastic features that prevent these sort of "out of space" issues:
1) You can leave some hard disk space in the Volume Group (VG) initially unallocated to Logical Volumes (LV's) and then add the unallocated space later to an LV (and its underlying filesystem) when it starts to become full. This ability to "grow" an LV and the underlying filesystem can happen while the filesystem is online and in-use.
2) You can shrink LV's as well, although they need to be unmounted first.3) You can easily migrate between hard drives while the system is online by moving LV's from one Physical Volume (PV) (eg: a hard disk) to another.
4) You can add multiple hard drives to an LVM Volume Group (VG - essentially a collection of PV's) and use the storage space from both drives to allocate space to an LV.
LVM is worth a look, at least to understand some of its benefits. I typically set my root partition at about 512 MB and then create LVM partitions for /home, /usr, /opt, and /var. (You could do the same for /tmp, but I use tmpfs for that.) It's possible to do LVM on the / partition, but that requires an initrd to work properly.
-- Josh
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