Clean install of OpenSuse 13.2 - What partitioning set up should I use?
Years ago I was very comfortable with a multi partition setup. But on starting an upgrade to OpenSuse 31.2 I have discovered that the machine needed a serious cleanout. So I tried to repartition into SWAP, / and /home. OpenSuse recommended btrfs for / and XFS for /home. I have used XFS for years so no problems. I allocated 20Gb for SWAP and 50Gb for / and the balance to /home. The install has failed because it could not format the BTRFS partition. I expect that in the process the new partition table has been created, so maybe the historical mess is gone. Can someone recommend a "standard" btrfs set up to save me some time, please? Andrew Greig
On Sun, 24 May 2015 09:22:43 AM Andrew Greig wrote:
I allocated 20Gb for SWAP and 50Gb for / and the balance to /home. The install has failed because it could not format the BTRFS partition. I expect that in the process the new partition table has been created, so maybe the historical mess is gone. Can someone recommend a "standard" btrfs set up to save me some time, please?
I doubt if there's anything more to recommend over what you've got there - I presume you're starting of nuking the partition table first and starting from scratch (with backups for anything necessary)? What does the error say? Is there more information in a different VTY? Best of luck, Chris -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC
Years ago I was very comfortable with a multi partition setup. But on starting an upgrade to OpenSuse 31.2 I have discovered that the machine needed a serious cleanout. So I tried to repartition into SWAP, / and /home. OpenSuse recommended btrfs for / and XFS for /home. I have used XFS for years so no problems. I allocated 20Gb for SWAP and 50Gb for / and the balance to /home. The install has failed because it could not format the BTRFS partition. I expect that in the process the new partition table has been created, so maybe the historical mess is gone. Can someone recommend a "standard" btrfs set up to save me some time, please?
Depends what the machine is doing. Aside from wanting to split / and /home into different filesystems I can't really see any reason to have anything but /, /boot, and swap. Especially for a desktop. BTRFS quotas should keep the various subvolumes under control space-wise, if you have that concern. I've noticed that Debian, in the "do everything for me" installation mode seems to put / before swap, which means if it's a VM and you later want to expand the disk, you'd need to shuffle things around a bit. For a VM though, I'd be running btrfs on the hypervisor and then run the VM on NFS, leaving the hypervisor to take the snapshots etc (depending on the VM workload - maybe NFS isn't so good for databases... I haven't checked recently). James
On Sat, 23 May 2015 11:50:12 PM James Harper wrote:
I can't really see any reason to have anything but /, /boot, and swap.
OpenSUSE btrfs installs have /boot on the root filesystem rather than a separate partition from what I've seen on the btrfs list (a recent thread there). -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC
On Sat, 23 May 2015 11:50:12 PM James Harper wrote:
I can't really see any reason to have anything but /, /boot, and swap.
OpenSUSE btrfs installs have /boot on the root filesystem rather than a separate partition from what I've seen on the btrfs list (a recent thread there).
Debian does that by default too, but most of my non-virtual installs are on multiple disks, and I like to keep /boot on a mirrored volume spread across all available disks, keep it on a separate partition to /, use a different filesystem to /, and stick a few extra recovery tools in it. Reiserfs taught me that :) That way if my / filesystem needs some fixing, /boot (being almost exclusively read-only except during upgrades) should still be in one piece. James
On Sun, 2015-05-24 at 10:03 +1000, Chris Samuel wrote:
On Sat, 23 May 2015 11:50:12 PM James Harper wrote:
I can't really see any reason to have anything but /, /boot, and swap.
OpenSUSE btrfs installs have /boot on the root filesystem rather than a separate partition from what I've seen on the btrfs list (a recent thread there).
Thanks to all, On the subsequent boot for the installation, the partition manager detected my previous proposal and so I accepted it. The installation was really fast for an OpenSuse install. Next I just have to configure the software repositories and get QlandkarteGT installed. Now that I have a larger cable plan it might be time to commit more data to the cloud. When I used Mandriva there were 2 groups of repositories, Official and Penguin Liberation Front for non-free applications, and a really handy site was http://easyurpmi.zarb.org which would detect the Mandriva version and configure the repositories. Fantastic really. Thanks again, Andrew Greig
On Sun, 24 May 2015 09:50:12 AM James Harper wrote:
Depends what the machine is doing. Aside from wanting to split / and /home into different filesystems I can't really see any reason to have anything but /, /boot, and swap. Especially for a desktop. BTRFS quotas should keep the various subvolumes under control space-wise, if you have that concern.
I wouldn't want to rely on BTRFS quotas at this time. It's a feature that hasn't had a lot of testing.
I've noticed that Debian, in the "do everything for me" installation mode seems to put / before swap, which means if it's a VM and you later want to expand the disk, you'd need to shuffle things around a bit. For a VM though, I'd be running btrfs on the hypervisor and then run the VM on NFS, leaving the hypervisor to take the snapshots etc (depending on the VM workload - maybe NFS isn't so good for databases... I haven't checked recently).
NFS is generally poor for any task that requires good write performance. For some of my virtual servers I have MySQL and Dovecot running in the Dom0 so that the DomUs have less disk intensive tasks. On Sun, 24 May 2015 09:59:30 AM Wen Lin wrote:
How big is your computer's memory? I would have thought 20 GB for swap space is a bit too much. Usually = or double the memory size will do?
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/28/swap-space/ Double RAM has never been a particularly good measure for allocating swap, and now that RAM is often 4G or more it's especially unsuitable. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 02:48:52PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
Double RAM has never been a particularly good measure for allocating swap, and now that RAM is often 4G or more it's especially unsuitable.
nowadays, with RAM being both cheap and plentiful, the only good reason to have lots of swap is if you want to be able to suspend to disk (e.g. with a laptop), in which case you need at least as much swap as RAM. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
[...] to be able to suspend to disk [...] you need at least as much swap as RAM.
AIUI in a situation like this, I'd need 256MiB (not 2GiB) of swap to suspend-to-disk. $ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1884 1178 706 269 0 966 -/+ buffers/cache: 211 1673 ...but I guess the space saved is not worth the cost of being unable to suspend-to-disk when firefox is open.
On 4 June 2015 at 16:27, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
[...] to be able to suspend to disk [...] you need at least as much swap as RAM.
AIUI in a situation like this, I'd need 256MiB (not 2GiB) of swap to suspend-to-disk.
$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1884 1178 706 269 0 966 -/+ buffers/cache: 211 1673
...but I guess the space saved is not worth the cost of being unable to suspend-to-disk when firefox is open.
Curious as to how you came to that conclusion? I found a couple of references to /sys/power/image_size as being the factor that deteremines how big the suspend-to-disk image will be. According to https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/interface.txt it's set to 2/5 of availanble RAM by default, as is the case on my home media server where it's set to 2/5 of 16Gb i.e. 6641303552 bytes. You can change of course and apparently setting it to zero causes the kernel to create the smallest image possible. -- Colin Fee tfeccles@gmail.com
Colin Fee <tfeccles@gmail.com> writes:
On 4 June 2015 at 16:27, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
I'd need 256MiB (not 2GiB) of swap to suspend-to-disk.
$ free -m total used free shared buffers -/+ buffers/cache: 211 1673
Curious as to how you came to that conclusion?
Pure speculation based on the assumption that suspend-to-disk saves *only* the active pages, i.e. excluding buffer/cache.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/interface.txt it's set to 2/5 of availanble RAM by default [...] setting it to zero causes the kernel to create the smallest image possible.
Interesting, thanks! I guess this is to avoid slow repacking to minimize the image size?
Hi Andrew, How big is your computer's memory? I would have thought 20 GB for swap space is a bit too much. Usually = or double the memory size will do? May be btrfs has different requirements from ext4? Wen. On May 24, 2015 9:38 AM, "Andrew Greig" <pushin.linux@gmail.com> wrote:
Years ago I was very comfortable with a multi partition setup. But on starting an upgrade to OpenSuse 31.2 I have discovered that the machine needed a serious cleanout. So I tried to repartition into SWAP, / and /home. OpenSuse recommended btrfs for / and XFS for /home. I have used XFS for years so no problems. I allocated 20Gb for SWAP and 50Gb for / and the balance to /home. The install has failed because it could not format the BTRFS partition. I expect that in the process the new partition table has been created, so maybe the historical mess is gone. Can someone recommend a "standard" btrfs set up to save me some time, please?
Andrew Greig
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participants (8)
-
Andrew Greig -
Chris Samuel -
Colin Fee -
Craig Sanders -
James Harper -
Russell Coker -
trentbuck＠gmail.com -
Wen Lin