  Linux Partition HOWTO
  Kristan Koehntopp, kris@koehntopp.de
  v2.4, 3 November 1997

  This Linux Mini-HOWTO teaches you how to plan and layout disk space
  for your Linux system. It talks about disk hardware, partitions, swap
  space sizing and positioning considerations. file systems, file system
  types and related topics. The intent is to teach some background
  knowledge, not procedures.
  ______________________________________________________________________

  Table of Contents


  1. Introduction

     1.1 What is this?
     1.2 What is in it? and related HOWTO documents

  2. What is a partition anyway?

     2.1 Backups are important
     2.2 Device numbers and device names

  3. What Partitions do I need?

     3.1 How many partitions do I need?
     3.2 How large should my swap space be?
     3.3 Where should I put my swap space?
     3.4 Some facts about file systems and fragmentation
     3.5 File lifetimes and backup cycles as partitioning criteria

  4. An example

     4.1 A recommended model for ambitious beginners

  5. How I did it on my machine

  ______________________________________________________________________

  1.  Introduction

  1.1.  What is this?


  This is a Linux Mini-HOWTO text. A Mini-HOWTO is a small text
  explaining some business related to Linux installation and maintenance
  tutorial style. It's mini, because either the text or the topic it
  discusses are too small for a real HOWTO or even a book. A HOWTO is
  not a reference:  that's what manual pages are for.


  1.2.  What is in it? and related HOWTO documents


  This particular Mini-HOWTO teaches you how to plan and layout disk
  space for your Linux system. It talks about disk hardware, partitions,
  swap space sizing and positioning considerations, file systems, file
  system types and related topics. The intent is to teach some
  background knowlegde, so we are talking mainly principles and not
  tools in this text.

  Ideally, this document should be read before your first installation,
  but this is somehow difficult for most people.  First timers have
  other problems than disk layout optimization, too. So you are probably
  someone who just finished a Linux installation and is now thinking
  about ways to optimize this installation or how to avoid some nasty
  miscalculations in the next one. Well, expect some desire to tear down
  and rebuild your installation when you are finished with this text.
  :-)


  This Mini-HOWTO limits itself to planning and layouting disk space
  most of the time. It does not discuss the usage of fdisk, LILO, mke2fs
  or backup programs. There are other HOWTOs that address these
  problems. Please see the Linux HOWTO Index for current information on
  Linux HOWTOs. There are instructions for obtaining HOWTO documents in
  the index, too.

  To learn how to estimate the various size and speed requirements for
  different parts of the filesystem, see "Linux Multiple Disks Layout
  mini-HOWTO", by Gjoen Stein <gjoen@nyx.net>.

  For instructions and considerations regarding disks with more than
  1024 cylinders, see "Linux Large Disk mini-HOWTO", Andries Brouwer
  <aeb@cwi.nl>.

  For instructions on limiting disk space usage per user (quotas), see
  "Linux Quota mini-HOWTO", by Albert M.C. Tam <bertie@scn.org>

  Currently, there is no general document on disk backup, but there are
  several documents with pointers to specific backup solutions. See
  "Linux ADSM Backup mini-HOWTO", by Thomas Koenig
  <Thomas.Koenig@ciw.uni-karlsruhe.de> for instructions on integrating
  Linux into an IBM ADSM backup environment. See "Linux Backup with
  MSDOS mini-HOWTO", by Christopher Neufeld
  <neufeld@physics.utoronto.ca> for information about MS-DOS driven
  Linux backups.

  For instructions on writing and submitting a HOWTO document, see the
  Linux HOWTO Index, by Tim Bynum <linux-howto@sunsite.unc.edu>.

  Browsing through /usr/src/linux/Documentation can be very instructive,
  too. See ide.txt and scsi.txt for some background information on the
  properties of your disk drivers and have a look at the filesystems/
  subdirectory.


  2.  What is a partition anyway?


  When PC hard disks were invented people soon wanted to install
  multiple operating systems, even if their system had only one disk.
  So a mechanism was needed to divide a single physical disk into
  multiple logical disks. So that's what a partition is: A contiguous
  section of blocks on your hard disk that is treated like a completely
  seperate disk by most operating systems.

  It is fairly clear that partitions must not overlap: An operating
  system will certainly not be pleased, if another operating system
  installed on the same machine were overwriting important information
  because of overlapping partitions. There should be no gap between
  adjacent partitions, too. While this constellation is not harmful, you
  are wasting precious disk space by leaving space between partitions.

  A disk need not be partitioned completely. You may decide to leave
  some space at the end of your disk that is not assigned to any of your
  installed operating systems, yet. Later, when it is clear which
  installation is used by you most of the time, you can partition this
  left over space and put a file system on it.
  Partitions can not be moved nor can they be resized without destroying
  the file system contained in it. So repartitioning usually involves
  backup and restore of all file systems touched during the
  repartitioning.  In fact it is fairly common to mess up things
  completely during repartitioning, so you should back up anything on
  any disk on that particular machine before even touching things like
  fdisk.

  Well, some partitions with certain file system types on them actually
  can be split into two without losing any data (if you are lucky). For
  example there is a program called "fips" for splitting MS-DOS
  partitions into two to make room for a Linux installation without
  having to reinstall MS-DOS. You are still not going to touch these
  things without carefully backing up everything on that machine, aren't
  you?


  2.1.  Backups are important


  Tapes are your friend for backups. They are fast, reliable and easy to
  use, so you can make backups often, preferably automatically and
  without hassle.

  Step on soapbox: And I am talking about real tapes, not that disk
  controller driven ftape crap. Consider buying SCSI: Linux does support
  SCSI natively. You don't need to load ASPI drivers, you are not losing
  precious HMA under Linux and once the SCSI host adapter is installed,
  you just attach additional disks, tapes and CD-ROMs to it. No more I/O
  addresses, IRQ juggling or Master/Slave and PIO-level matching.

  Plus: Proper SCSI host adapters give you high I/O performance without
  much CPU load. Even under heavy disk activity you will experience good
  response times. If you are planning to use a Linux system as a major
  USENET news feed or if you are about to enter the ISP business, don't
  even think about deploying a system without SCSI. Climb of soapbox.


  2.2.  Device numbers and device names


  The number of partitions on an Intel based system was limited from the
  very beginning: The original partition table was installed as part of
  the boot sector and held space for only four partition entries.  These
  partitions are now called primary partitions. When it became clear
  that people needed more partitions on their systems, logical
  partitions were invented.  The number of logical partitions is not
  limited: Each logical partition contains a pointer to the next logical
  partition, so you can have a potentially unlimited chain of partition
  entries.

  For compatibility reasons, the space occupied by all logical
  partitions had to be accounted for. If you are using logical
  partitions, one primary partition entry is marked as "extended
  partition" and its starting and ending block mark the area occupied by
  your logical partitions. This implies that the space assigned to all
  logical partitions has to be contiguous.  There can be only one
  extended partition: no fdisk program will create more than one
  extended partition.

  Linux cannot handle more than a limited number of partitions per
  drive. So in Linux you have 4 primary partitions (3 of them useable,
  if you are using logical partitions) and at most 15 partitions
  altogether on an SCSI disk (63 altogether on an IDE disk).


  In Linux, partitions are represented by device files. A device file is
  a file with type c (for "character" devices, devices that do not use
  the buffer cache) or b (for "block" devices, which go through the
  buffer cache). In Linux, all disks are represented as block devices
  only. Unlike other Unices, Linux does not offer "raw" character
  versions of disks and their partitions.

  The only important thing with a device file are its major and minor
  device number, shown instead of the files size:

       ______________________________________________________________________
       $ ls -l /dev/hda
       brw-rw----   1 root     disk       3,   0 Jul 18  1994 /dev/hda
                                          ^    ^
                                          |    minor device number
                                          major device number
       ______________________________________________________________________

  When accessing a device file, the major number selects which device
  driver is being called to perform the input/output operation. This
  call is being done with the minor number as a parameter and it is
  entirely up to the driver how the minor number is being interpreted.
  The driver documentation usually describes how the driver uses minor
  numbers. For IDE disks, this documentation is in
  /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ide.txt.  For SCSI disks, one would
  expect such documentation in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/scsi.txt,
  but it isn't there. One has to look at the driver source to be sure
  (/usr/src/linux/driver/scsi/sd.c:184-196). Fortunately, there is Peter
  Anvin's list of device numbers and names in
  /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt; see the entries for block
  devices, major 3, 22, 33, 34 for IDE and major 8 for SCSI disks. The
  major and minor numbers are a byte each and that is why the number of
  partitions per disk is limited.

  By convention device files have certain names and many system programs
  have knowledge about these names compiled in. They expect your IDE
  disks to be named /dev/hd* and your SCSI disks to be named /dev/sd*.
  Disks are numbered a, b, c and so on, so /dev/hda is your first IDE
  disk and /dev/sda is your first SCSI disk. Both devices represent
  entire disks, starting at block one.  Writing to these devices with
  the wrong tools will destroy the master boot loader and partition
  table on these disks, rendering all data on this disk unusable or
  making your system unbootable. Know what you are doing and, again,
  back up before you do it.

  Primary partitions on a disk are 1, 2, 3 and 4. So /dev/hda1 is the
  first primary partition on the first IDE disk and so on.  Logical
  partitions have numbers 5 and up, so /dev/sdb5 is the first logical
  partition on the second SCSI disk.

  Each partition entry has a starting and an ending block address
  assigned to it and a type. The type is a numerical code (a byte) which
  designates a particular partition to a certain type of operating
  system. For the benefit of computing consultants partition type codes
  are not really unique, so there is always the probability of two
  operating systems using the same type code.

  Linux reserves the type code 0x82 for swap partitions and 0x83 for
  "native" file systems (that's ext2 for almost all of you).  The once
  popular, now outdated Linux/Minix file system used the type code 0x81
  for partitions. OS/2 marks it's partitions with a 0x07 type and so
  does Windows NT's NTFS. MS-DOS allocates several type codes for its
  various flavors of FAT file systems: 0x01, 0x04 and 0x06 are known.
  DR-DOS used 0x81 to indicate protected FAT partitions, creating a type
  clash with Linux/Minix at that time, but neither Linux/Minix nor DR-
  DOS are widely used any more. The extended partition which is used as
  a container for logical partitions has a type of 0x05, by the way.

  Partitions are created and deleted with the fdisk program.  Every self
  respecting operating system program comes with an fdisk and
  traditionally it is even called fdisk (or FDISK.EXE) in almost all
  OSes. Some fdisks, noteable the DOS one, are somehow limited when they
  have to deal with other operating systems partitions. Such limitations
  include the complete inability to deal with anything with a foreign
  type code, the inability to deal with cylinder numbers above 1024 and
  the inability to create or even understand partitions that do not end
  on a cylinder boundary. For example, the MS-DOS fdisk can't delete
  NTFS partitions, the OS/2 fdisk has been known to silently "correct"
  partitions created by the Linux fdisk that do not end on a cylinder
  boundary and both, the DOS and the OS/2 fdisk, have had problems with
  disks with more than 1024 cylinders (see the "large-disk" Mini-Howto
  for details on such disks).


  3.  What Partitions do I need?

  3.1.  How many partitions do I need?


  Okay, so what partitions do you need? Well, some operating systems do
  not believe in booting from logical partitions for reasons that are
  beyond the scope of any sane mind. So you probably want to reserve
  your primary partitions as boot partitions for your MS-DOS, OS/2 and
  Linux or whatever you are using. Remember that one primary partition
  is needed as an extended partition, which acts as a container for the
  rest of your disk with logical partitions.

  Booting operating systems is a real-mode thing involving BIOSes and
  1024 cylinder limitations. So you probably want to put all your boot
  partitions into the first 1024 cylinders of your hard disk, just to
  avoid problems. Again, read the "large-disk" Mini-Howto for the gory
  details.


  To install Linux, you will need at least one partition. If the kernel
  is loaded from this partition (for example by LILO), this partition
  must be readable by your BIOS. If you are using other means to load
  your kernel (for example a boot disk or the LOADLIN.EXE MS-DOS based
  Linux loader) the partition can be anywhere. In any case this
  partition will be of type 0x83 "Linux native".

  Your system will need some swap space. Unless you swap to files you
  will need a dedicated swap partition. Since this partition is only
  accessed by the Linux kernel and the Linux kernel does not suffer from
  PC BIOS deficiencies, the swap partition may be positioned anywhere.
  I recommed using a logical partition for it (/dev/?d?5 and higher).
  Dedicated Linux swap partitions are of type 0x82 "Linux swap".

  These are minimal partition requirements. It may be useful to create
  more partitions for Linux. Read on.

  3.2.  How large should my swap space be?

  If you have decided to use a dedicated swap partition, which is
  generally a Good Idea [tm], follow these guidelines for estimating its
  size:


  ·  In Linux RAM and swap space add up (This is not true for all
     Unices). For example, if you have 8 MB of RAM and 12 MB swap space,
     you have a total of about 20 MB virtual memory.

  ·  When sizing your swap space, you should have at least 16 MB of
     total virtual memory. So for 4 MB of RAM consider at least 12 MB of
     swap, for 8 MB of RAM consider at least 8 MB of swap.

  ·  In Linux, a single swap partition can not be larger than 128 MB.
     That is, the partition may be larger than 128 MB, but excess space
     is never used. If you want more than 128 MB of swap, you have to
     create multiple swap partitions.

  ·  When sizing swap space, keep in mind that too much swap space may
     not be useful at all.

     Every process has a "working set". This is a set of in-memory pages
     which will be referenced by the processor in the very near future.
     Linux tries to predict these memory accesses (assuming that
     recently used pages will be used again in the near future) and
     keeps these pages in RAM if possible. If the program has a good
     "locality of reference" this assumption will be true and prediction
     algorithm will work.

     Holding a working set in main memory does only work if there is
     enough main memory. If you have too many processes running on a
     machine, the kernel is forced to put pages on disk that it will
     reference again in the very near future (forcing a page-out of a
     page from another working set and then a page-in of the page
     referenced). Usually this results in a very heavy increase in
     paging activity and in a sustantial drop of performance. A machine
     in this state is said to be "thrashing" (For you german readers:
     That's "thrashing" ("dreschen", "schlagen", "haemmern") and not
     trashing ("muellen")).

     On a thrashing machine the processes are essentially running from
     disk and not from RAM. Expect performance to drop by approximately
     the ratio between memory access speed and disk access speed.

     A very old rule of thumb in the days of the PDP and the Vax was
     that the size of the working set of a program is about 25% of its
     virtual size. Thus it is probably useless to provide more swap than
     three times your RAM.

     But keep in mind that this is just a rule of thumb. It is easily
     possible to create scenarios where programs have extremely large or
     extremely small working sets. For example, a simulation program
     with a large data set that is accessed in a very random fashion
     would have almost no noticeable locality of reference in its data
     segment, so its working set would be quite large.

     On the other hand, an xv with many simultaneously opened JPEGs, all
     but one iconified, would have a very large data segment. But image
     transformations are all done on one single image, most of the
     memory occupied by xv is never touched.  The same is true for an
     editor with many editor windows where only one window is being
     modified at a time.  These programs have - if they are designed
     properly - a very high locality of reference and large parts of
     them can be kept swapped out without too severe performance impact.

     One could suspect that the 25% number from the age of the command
     line is no longer true for modern GUI programs editing multiple
     documents, but I know of no newer papers that try to verify these
     numbers.

  So for a configuration with 16 MB RAM, no swap is needed for a minimal
  configuration and more than 48 MB of swap are probably useless. The
  exact amount of memory needed depends on the application mix on the
  machine (what did you expect?).


  3.3.  Where should I put my swap space?

  ·  Mechanics are slow, electronics are fast.

     Modern hard disks have many heads. Switching between heads of the
     same track is fast, since it is purely electronic.  Switching
     between tracks is slow, since it involves moving real world matter.

     So if you have a disk with many heads and one with less heads and
     both are identical in other parameters, the disk with many heads
     will be faster.

     Splitting swap and putting it on both disks will be even faster,
     though.

  ·  Older disks have the same number of sectors on all tracks.  With
     this disks it will be fastest to put your swap in the middle of the
     disks, assuming that your disk head will move from a random track
     towards the swap area.

  ·  Newer disks use ZBR (zone bit recording). They have more sectors on
     the outer tracks. With a constant number of rpms, this yields a far
     greater performance on the outer tracks than on the inner ones. Put
     your swap on the fast tracks.

  ·  Of course your disk head will not move randomly. If you have swap
     space in the middle of a disk between a constantly busy home
     partition and an almost unused archive partition, you would be
     better of if your swap were in the middle of the home partition for
     even shorter head movements. You would be even better off, if you
     had your swap on another otherwise unused disk, though.

  Summary: Put your swap on a fast disk with many heads that is not busy
  doing other things. If you have multiple disks: Split swap and scatter
  it over all your disks or even different controllers.

  Even better: Buy more RAM.


  3.4.  Some facts about file systems and fragmentation


  Disk space is administered by the operating system in units of blocks
  and fragments of blocks. In ext2, fragments and blocks have to be of
  the same size, so we can limit our discussion to blocks.

  Files come in any size. They don't end on block boundaries.  So with
  every file a part of the last block of every file is wasted. Assuming
  that file sizes are random, there is approximately a half block of
  waste for each file on your disk.  Tanenbaum calls this "internal
  fragmentation" in his book "Operating Systems".

  You can guess the number of files on your disk by the number of
  allocated inodes on a disk. On my disk
       ______________________________________________________________________
       # df -i
       Filesystem           Inodes   IUsed   IFree  %IUsed Mounted on
       /dev/hda3              64256   12234   52022    19%  /
       /dev/hda5              96000   43058   52942    45%  /var
       ______________________________________________________________________

  there are about 12000 files on / and about 44000 files on /var.  At a
  block size of 1 KB, about 6+22 = 28 MB of disk space are lost in the
  tail blocks of files. Had I chosen a block size of 4 KB, I had lost 4
  times this space.


  Data transfer is faster for large contiguous chunks of data, though.
  That's why ext2 tries to preallocate space in units of 8 contigous
  blocks for growing files. Unused preallocation is released when the
  file is closed, so no space is wasted.

  Noncontiguous placement of blocks in a file is bad for performance,
  since files are often accessed in a sequential manner. It forces the
  operating system to split a disk access and the disk to move the head.
  This is called "external fragmentation" or simply "fragmentation" and
  is a common problem with DOS file systems.

  ext2 has several strategies to avoid external fragmentation.  Normally
  fragmentation is not a large problem in ext2, not even on heavily used
  partitions such as a USENET news spool. While there is a tool for
  defragmentation of ext2 file systems, nobody ever uses it and it is
  not up to date with the current release of ext2. Use it, but do so on
  your own risk.

  The MS-DOS file system is well known for its pathological managment of
  disk space. In conjunction with the abysmal buffer cache used by MS-
  DOS the effects of file fragmentation on performance are very
  noticeable. DOS users are accustomed to defragging their disks every
  few weeks and some have even developed some ritualistic beliefs
  regarding defragmentation.  None of these habits should be carried
  over to Linux and ext2.  Linux native file systems do not need
  defragmentation under normal use and this includes any condition with
  at least 5% of free space on a disk.


  The MS-DOS file system is also known to lose large amounts of disk
  space due to internal fragmentation. For partitions larger than 256
  MB, DOS block sizes grow so large that they are no longer useful (This
  has been corrected to some extent with FAT32).

  ext2 does not force you to choose large blocks for large file systems,
  except for very large file systems in the 0.5 TB range (that's
  terabytes with 1 TB equaling 1024 GB) and above, where small block
  sizes become inefficient. So unlike DOS there is no need to split up
  large disks into multiple partitions to keep block size down. Use the
  1 KB default block size if possible. You may want to experiment with a
  block size of 2 KB for some partitions, but expect to meet some seldom
  exercised bugs: Most people use the default.


  3.5.  File lifetimes and backup cycles as partitioning criteria


  With ext2, Partitioning decisions should be governed by backup
  considerations and to avoid external fragmentation from different file
  lifetimes.
  Files have lifetimes. After a file has been created, it will remain
  some time on the system and then be removed. File lifetime varies
  greatly throughout the system and is partly dependent on the pathname
  of the file. For example, files in /bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/bin
  and similar directories are likely to have a very long lifetime: many
  months and above.  Files in /home are likely to have a medium
  lifetime: several weeks or so. File in /var are usually short lived:
  Almost no file in /var/spool/news will remain longer than a few days,
  files in /var/spool/lpd measure their lifetime in minutes or less.


  For backup it is useful if the amount of daily backup is smaller than
  the capacity of a single backup medium. A daily backup can be a
  complete backup or an incremental backup.

  You can decide to keep your partition sizes small enough that they fit
  completely onto one backup medium (choose daily full backups). In any
  case a partition should be small enough that its daily delta (all
  modified files) fits onto one backup medium (choose incremental backup
  and expect to change backup media for the weekly/monthly full dump -
  no unattended operation possible).

  Your backup strategy depends on that decision.

  When planning and buying disk space, remember to set aside a
  sufficient amount of money for backup! Unbackuped data is worthless!
  Data reproduction costs are much higher than backup costs for
  virtually everyone!


  For performance it is useful to keep files of different lifetimes on
  different partitions. This way the short lived files on the news
  partition may be fragmented very heavily.  This has no impact on the
  performance of the / or /home partition.


  4.  An example

  4.1.  A recommended model for ambitious beginners


  A common model creates /, /home and /var partitions as discussed
  above. This is simple to install and maintain and differentiates well
  enough to avoid adverse effects from different lifetimes. It fits well
  into a backup model, too:  Almost noone bothers to backup USENET news
  spools and only some files in /var are worth backing up
  (/var/spool/mail comes to mind). On the other hand, / changes
  infrequently and can be backuped upon demand (after configuration
  changes) and is small enough to fit on most modern backup media as a
  full backup (plan 250 to 500 MB depending on the amount of installed
  software). /home contains valuable user data and should be backuped
  daily.  Some installations have very large /homes and must use
  incremental backups.

  Some systems put /tmp onto a seperate partition as well, others
  symlink it to /var/tmp to achieve the same effect (note that this can
  affect single user mode, where /var will be unavailable and the system
  will have no /tmp until you create one or mount /var manually) or put
  it onto a RAM disk (Solaris does this for example). This keeps /tmp
  out of /, a good idea.

  This model is convenient for upgrades or reinstallations as well: Save
  your configuration files (or the entire /etc) to some /home directory,
  scrap your /, reinstall and fetch the old configurations from the save
  directory on /home.

  5.  How I did it on my machine


  There was this old ISA bus 386/40 sitting on my shelf that I abandoned
  two years ago because it no longer cut it. I was planning to turn it
  into a small X-less server for my household LAN.

  Here is how I did it: I took that 386 and put 16 MB RAM into it.
  Added a cheap EIDE disk, the smallest I could get (800 MB) and an
  ethernet card. Added an old Hercules because I still had a monitor for
  it. Installed Linux on it and there I have my local NFS, SMB, HTTP,
  LPD/LPR and NNTP server as well as my mail router and POP3 server.
  With an additional ISDN card the machine became my TCP/IP router and
  firewall, too.

  Most of the disk space on this machine went into the /var directories,
  /var/spool/mail, /var/spool/news and /var/httpd/html. I put /var on a
  separate partition and made this one large. There will be almost no
  users on this machine, so I created no home partition and mounted
  /home from some other workstation via NFS.

  Linux without X plus several locally installed utilities will be fine
  with a 250 MB partition as /. The machine has 16 MB of RAM, but it
  will be running many servers. 16 MB swap should be in order, 32 MB
  should be plenty. We are not short on disk space, so the machine will
  get 32 MB.  Out of sentimentality a MS-DOS partition of some 20 MB is
  kept on it.  I decided to import /home from another machine, so the
  remaining 500+ MB will end up as /var. This is more than sufficient
  for a household USENET news feed.

  We get

       ______________________________________________________________________
       Device     Mounted on                      Size
       /dev/hda1  /dos_c                           25 MB
       /dev/hda2  - (Swapspace)                    32 MB
       /dev/hda3  /                               250 MB
       /dev/hda4  - (Extended Container)          500 MB
       /dev/hda5  /var                            500 MB

       homeserver:/home /home                     1.6 GB
       ______________________________________________________________________

  I am backing up this machine via the network using the tape in
  homeserver. Since everything on this machine has been installed from
  CD-ROM all I have to save are some configuration files from /etc, my
  customized locally installed *.tgz files from /root/Source/Installed
  and /var/spool/mail as well as /var/httpd/html.  I copy these files
  into a dedicated directory /home/backmeup on homeserver every night,
  where the regular homeserver backup picks them up.

