9.0 install and journaling

[Manolis Kiagias]

On 10/12/2011 5:19 μμ, Warren Block wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, R Skinner wrote:
>
>> So I went to the handbook. I'm still a little confused though: can 
>> one still setup the usr and var (and so forth)? It said you possibly 
>> could, but it escaped me as to how.
>
> Use the bsdinstall partition editor to manually create the partitions. 
> I documented how to create an old-fashioned MBR layout with bsdinstall 
> on the forums a while back:
> http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=149210&postcount=13
>
> The process would be similar for GPT, which is really the way to go now.
>

As Warren says, you can still create /usr and /var and all the other 
"legacy" partitions if you so wish - and you may even use the full 
journaling (gjournal) on them.
But the default for bsdinstall is to use gpart, install everything on a 
big / and create UFS2 partitions with the new soft-updates journaling 
system (on by default). Compared to gjournal, soft-updates journaling 
only journals metadata and not everything like gjournal does. This will 
definitely make it faster although probably less "safe" than gjournal. 
It should be good for most purposes though and needs no additional steps 
after install (unlike gjournal). Since it's the default, the decision to 
go for one big / seems ok after all. I believe this is more or less what 
Linux is doing with Ext3/Ext4 filesystems (metadata journaling).