[indiana-discuss] Default Partitions sizes

[Richard Elling]

Peter Tribble wrote:
> On 10/4/07, Dev Mazumdar <dev at opensound.com> wrote:
>> I absolutely hate Solaris's default partitions - 1 small root 1 small swap and a huge freakin /export/home.
>>
>> The problem is that when you install dev tools and other Blastwave apps, they all go into /opt (or /usr/local) and you're pretty much screwed out of space in /tmp as well. So now none of your compiling or editors have space for temp files.
>>
>> My suggestion for Indiana is now that we have journaling turned on, why not have  1 swap partition = 2-4 x real memory and the rest allocated to root. We no longer need to worry about running out of disk space and having to install programs in other directories only to find out that they sometimes don't behave properly if they aren't installed in their "default" directory (usually /usr/local or /opt)
> 
> We had a discussion over in sysadmin-discuss recently:
> 
> http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=39882&tstart=15
> 
> (which I ought to write up a summary for) which basically goes along
> with the 'keep it simple' approach.
> 
> And, you'll note that there was a contribution regarding the standards
> that Sun use to build preinstalled systems, excerpted here:
> 
> http://wikis.sun.com/display/BigAdmin/BootDiskLayout
> 
> although that's fairly recent.

As one of the contributors to the EIS boot disk layout docs, I can
assure you that we covered every possible viewpoint for UFS root.
When ZFS root becomes real, much of this evaporates, which is a good
thing.  In the interim, the document should be viewed as a concensus
document where we attempt to identify reasonable practices and pitfalls.

My recommendation is to use ZFS root as soon as it is available.  KISS.

[I actually didn't know this was posted to BigAdmin, but I am glad it is :-)]
  -- richard