9.0 install and journaling

[Da Rock]

On 12/11/11 02:09, Manolis Kiagias wrote:
> 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).
GPT is cool - no problems there. The main thing I want to know is if I 
need to run fsck every time the system dies unexpectedly (which is a 
higher occurrence on a laptop)? GJournal helps in that it takes care of 
that. The growing size of drives is another concern given the time it 
takes to check a 500G disk (my smallest atm), although this is way down 
on the list for the moment.

As for one big / partition- linux may be using it: and its their biggest 
failing! I've had a system lockup due to lack of space. Never a problem 
with bsd as logs will only fill up var, a user won't break it with 
filling up usr, etc. And root always stays protected! Its saved my life 
a number of times... I can quickly fill TB's of data in no time, and if 
something goes bang the logs can be a silent killer too. My 2c's anyway...