Default FS Layout Too Small?

[David Lindström]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ruben de Groot" <mail25 at bzerk.org>
To: "David Lindstr??m" <dvdmandt at telia.com>
Cc: <current at freebsd.org>
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 1:29 PM
Subject: Re: Default FS Layout Too Small?


> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 06:54:59PM +0100, David Lindstr??m typed:
>> Hi everyone, I'm new to this list, and fairly new to FreeBSD. I'm a CS
>> student currently using FreeBSD for fun and learning, but I'm hoping to 
>> one
>> day make myself useful to the community, if nothing else as a tester.
>
> Welcome
>
>> >From my limited experience, I think you should consider an update to the
>> auto defaults, if nothing else to allow it to use more than one disk. 
>> Also,
>
> This is not trivial. Could you come up with an algorithm that gives
> reasonable defaults for all possible instances of "more than one disk"?
> Should the installer by default auto partition an external USB drive?
>
>> wouldn't it be a good idea to create a /home by default, or is there some
>> reason I can't think of right now why you want it in the /usr filesystem?
>
> Why would you want a seperate /home partition on e.g. a database server?
>
> Ruben

Ahh, you're right, it's not trivial.

There seems to be three major categories of FreeBSD systems.
1 Desktop
2 Multiple users servers (webb hosting, ..)
3 Data servers (database or email for example)

For 1 and 2, you may very well want a separate /home partition/slice/disk, 
storing all the users files. For 3, you'd probably just want a huge data 
partition instead (/var?). Perhaps some form of wizard?

Algorithm for using multiple disks/slices. Well, instead of selecting one, 
allow multiple selection. That way the external USB drive issue solves 
itself. Sort possible partitions by potential disk usage (or something 
similar). If there's more than 5 slices to use, just place one partition on 
each slice, using the biggest slice for the highest potential-disk-usage 
partition. If there's less than 5 slices however, pick the smallest 
partition and place it on the smallest slice with enough space, then pick 
the next smallest partition and place it on the smallest slice with enough 
space and repeat until there are as many partitions left as slices left.

Another think I thought about is to create a list/table/queue/whatever of 
how to distribute avaible space. The list or whatever would look something 
like this:
/ - 256M
/var - 256M
/tmp - 256M
/usr - 1024M
swap - $(RAMSIZE) M  // or whatever
/usr - 4096M
/var - 256M
/tmp - 256M
/ - 256M
/usr - 8192M
/ - 512M
...

As long as there's diskspace left, you step down the list and add the amount 
to the partition listed. In the above example, if you had 2Gb it would 
basicly skip swap and give 256Mb to /, /var and /tmp, and 1Gb to /usr. If 
you had 16Gb, it would pretty much equal current defaults. If you add some 
more diskspace, it would soon add another 512Mb to / and so on. The idea is 
to better use diskspace. If you have 2Tb space, you can probably afford to 
have 1Gb for your / partition, while if you have 10Gb, 512Mb may be too 
much. Obviously the list would need to be carefully adjusted.

Mvh
David Lindström