[clug] Suggestions on Partitions and Mounts for Solid State Disk Drive

[Andrew Janke]

On 26 March 2017 at 18:35, Andrew Steele via linux
<linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:
> I'll bite. :-)

metoo.

> As there a reason you're wanting to use plain partitions rather than using
> LVM?
>
> Generally, I'd have a smallish /boot partition on sda1, then sda2 would be
> the rest of the disk as a PV. Then all the various mounts would be LVs
> which can be easily resized as the need arises.

In a similar fashion to the advice of LVM have you considered running
file based swap in order to reduce the number of partitions?

I changed to this many years ago due to needs of {in,de}creasing swap
on the fly. At the time it was on 500+ core linux clusters that were
running variable size jobs. Since then I've also started doing this on
laptops/desktops, the installer will gripe about no swap partition but
just ignore that. There is no noticeable speed penalty in all the
testing we've done, recipe for doing this is below:

# 4GB file based swap
dd if=/dev/zero of=/4GB-swap-00 bs=1M count=4096
mkswap /4GB-swap-00
swapon /4GB-swap-00

echo >> /etc/fstab
echo "# Swap file" >> /etc/fstab
echo "/4GB-swap-00  none  swap  sw  0 0" >> /etc/fstab

Note that when doing this you can have multiple swap files and just
add/remove them as you choose, you can even mix/match swap
partitions and files. If you are cautious you can flush the
file cache before adding/removing:

# to clear file cache (if you want)
sync
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

I myself typically don't run LVM and only run with two partitions on both
clusters and desktops/laptops, / and /tmp with TMPDIR set to /tmp.
Makes for simple management, home dirs and data are all via NFS
or on a separate disk. The only time I run a separate /boot partition is
to get around storage driver issues.

I'm surprised that the major distros don't use swap files over
partitions, it makes the install simpler.


a