One small /boot which is also my EFI system partition.
And a partition for / which covers all the rest of the drive.
Partitioning only limits flexibility. At some time you will regret your choice of partition sizes.
Tbf, you can mitigate this problem by using lvm or btrfs with subvolumes.
I dan’t know if this is still valid but I used to be told to have different partitions for your system, logs and data (home directories) … and have the swap-partition located in between them. This was to limit the distance the head has to move when reading from your system starts swapping.
But if you use a SSD drive, that is not valid anymore of course :-)
Kr.
Nowadays you don’t even need a /boot unless you’re doing full disk encryption and I actually recommend keeping /boot on / if you’re doing BTRFS root snapshots. Being able to include your kernel images in your snapshots makes rollbacks painlessly easy.
UEFI forum made it a requirement for motherboard constructors (hp, dell, msi…) to make their UEFI implementation to be able to at least read fat(12/16/32) filesystems. That is why you need a fat(12/16/32) partition flagged ESP (efi system partition) for holding your boot files.
So, I dont think you can do that unless you fall back to the old outdated BIOS/MBR or you have some *nix filesystem in your uefi implementation which I dont trust.
You’re only partially correct. /boot doesn’t have to also be your EFI partition. In fact, most distros by default will separate the two, with the EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi and /boot being a separate ext4 based partition. My suggestion is that, if you’re running BTRFS, you should merge /boot and / as one partition. You’re still free to have a FAT32-based EFI mounted at /boot/efi or better yet /efi.
I’ve heard that you have to put in your encryption pw twice if you do it that way no?
Out of curiosity, what’s stopping you from shrinking the partition and adding a swap partition?
Aaaand your server just crashed because of a spammy log. You lost the company $222 million overnight, the database is corrupt, and every 9 minutes the company looses another $1 million.
Good job.
systemd resets the logs when they get big, this isn’t the 2000s anymore. But if you want to limit the size of /var/log, any modern filesystem has disk quotas per-directory
It really depends on your requirements…
But a few useful points:
- Use GPT partition table and not MBR. Everything will be simpler, no need for extended/logical partitions.
- If you need to be able to do online (mounted) partition resizing, pick btrfs. Ext4 can only grow them online but not shrink.
- Make sure your partition boundaries are 1 MiB aligned.
- If you need more advanced setups, consider using LVM.
About lvm though, experiment with it before jumping in with your daily driver.
Indeed, it’s a bit more complex setup, you won’t be able to boot without initramfs. But in certain cases (e.g. encryption or partitions spanning multiple devices) it is very useful.
1Gb EFI, rest of the disk LUKS with a single BTRFS inside. Use BTRFS subvols to divide things up. Swap as a swap file on BTRFS (be sure to set it as no_cow).
In many of my laptop setups I’ve also solidified around similar setup: 200 or 500 mb efi + luks with lvm with root and home volumes. Swap is a file which makes everything easy without having to care about another partition and is automatically encrypted since it stays on root.
Partition formats is always ext4 since there’s no need for anything else. Tried btrfs in the past and it had problems, more than it solved, and xfs years ago regularly had problems corrupting files when power went off. I swore on never using any of those 2 again.
Same, except ZFS instead of BTRFS for me.
And / is tmpfs, /home is tmpfs, /nix, /etc/nixos, /var/log, /home/$username/downloads, /home/$username/documents, and some other directories are ZFS subvolumes bind-mounted at boot. That’s only an option for NixOS or Guix though, so don’t worry about opt-in state on other distros.
I prefer a very small EFI partition mounted at /boot/efi, that way the kernels and initrds sit at /boot alongside the rest ot the files (though if you also want encryption you need to add your encryption keys to initrd so you don’t have to enter the password twice)
Some distributions (e.g. NixOS) store their kernels on the EFI partition, going small will bite you on those. 1GB is a good size. The Windows default of 100MB is only enough to store two kernels.
Edit: This might actually be systemd-boot specific.
I use NixOS, and read my comment again. /boot/efi is only for GRUB. /boot is where the actual kernels reside, and it isn’t on the EFI partition.
i usually have efi boot partition (512mb), / (linux root), /home (i usually make this pretty big) , and swap partition.
Same: EFI, then / is small like 50GB, and home is the remaining of disk. My swap is the size of RAM so I could hibernate but in fact never use it really, as my system either sleep or if shutdowned, can boot in a few seconds. You cannot go wrong with the setup from @buwho@lemmy.ml.
There was a time when I had (and we needed) complicated partition… one for / really small like a few MB, and basically one for bin, etc, var, use, home, tmp (not a lot of RAM at the time so tmp was on disk, not in ram) etc.
Usually, I do the simplest thing: all the stuff goes on one big ext4 partition. I don’t make a separate partition for /home. I’ll make a swap partition if I can remember but I’ve forgotten to do that before and nothing bad happened. The bootloader goes on a fat32 /boot/efi on the same drive as whatever the Linux install is on. This way I can swap around the drive to different pcs if I have to or easily change/upgrade drives without having to reinstall all my stuff.
This strategy works for dual booting Windows also. I’ll put the windows install all on its own separate drive so it won’t try to erase grub during a disk check or something. That happened one time. Also, by putting Windows and Linux on separate drives you can use the bios to boot between Windows or Linux if you mess up one of the bootloaders.
