2.1.1. Naming Convention

By convention, IDE drives will be given device names /dev/hda to /dev/hdd. The first drive is 'a' the second drive 'b' and so on. For example, /dev/hda is the first drive on the first IDE controller and /dev/hdd is the second drive on the second controller (the fourth IDE drive in the computer). You can write to these devices directly (using cat or dd). However, since these devices represent the entire disk, starting at the first block, you can mistakenly overwrite the master boot record and the partition table, which will render the drive unusable.

Once a drive has been partitioned, the partitions will be represented as numbers on the end of the names. For example, the second partition on the second drive will be /dev/hdb2. SCSI drives follow a similar pattern; They are represented by 'sd' instead of 'hd'. The first partition of the second SCSI drive would therefore be /dev/sdb1.

Primary partitions (Section 3.3) on a disk are 1, 2, 3 and 4. Logical partitions (Section 3.4) have numbers 5 and up, for reasons explained later (Section 5.1.3).

2.1.2. Name Assignment

Under (Sun) Solaris and (SGI) IRIX, the device name given to a SCSI drive has some relationship to where you plug it in. Under linux, there is only wailing and gnashing of teeth. Lower SCSI ID numbers are assigned lower-order letters, so if you remove one drive from the chain, the names of the higher ID number drives will change. If you have two SCSI controllers in your linux box, you will need to examine the output of /bin/dmesg in order to see what name each drive was assigned. If you remove one of two controllers, the remaining controller might have all its drives renamed. Grrr...

This is all you have to know to deal with linux disk devices. For the sake of completeness, see Kristian's discussion of device numbers below.

4.3.1. Which file systems need their own partitions?

Everything in your linux file system can go in the same (single) partition. However, there are circumstances when you may want to restrict the growth of certain file systems. For example, if your mail spool was in the same partition as your root fs and it filled the remaining space in the partition, your computer would basically hang.

4.3.2. File lifetimes and backup cycles as partitioning criteria

With ext2, partitioning decisions should be governed by backup considerations and to avoid external fragmentation (Section 7.3) 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.

4.4.1. 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.

• Currently, the maximum size of a swap partition is architecture-dependent. For i386 and PowerPC, it is approximately 2Gb. It is 128Gb on alpha, 1Gb on sparc, and 3Tb on sparc64. For linux kernels 2.1 and earlier, the limit is 128Mb. The partition may be larger than 128 MB, but excess space is never used. If you want more than 128 MB of swap for a 2.1 and earlier kernel, you have to create multiple swap partitions. See the man page for mkswap for details.

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

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?).

4.4.2. 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 these 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.

5.1.1. Notes about fdisk:

fdisk is started by typing (as root) fdisk device at the command prompt. "device" (Section 2.1.1) might be something like /dev/hda or /dev/sda. The basic fdisk commands you need are:

Changes you make to the partition table do not take effect until you issue the write (w) command. Here is a sample partition table:

Disk /dev/hdb: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 621 cylinders Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 184 370912+ 83 Linux /dev/hdb2 185 368 370944 83 Linux /dev/hdb3 369 552 370944 83 Linux /dev/hdb4 553 621 139104 82 Linux swap

The first line shows the geometry of your hard drive. It may not be physically accurate, but you can accept it as though it were. The hard drive in this example is made of 32 double-sided platters with one head on each side (probably not true). Each platter has 621 concentric tracks. A 3-dimensional track (the same track on all disks) is called a cylinder. Each track is divided into 63 sectors. Each sector contains 512 bytes of data. Therefore the block size in the partition table is 64 heads * 63 sectors * 512 bytes er...divided by 1024. (See 4 for discussion on problems with this calculation.)

The start and end values are cylinders. The first cylinder (0) is reserved for information about the drive layout.

5.1.2. Four primary partitions

The overview:Decide on the size (Section 4.4.1) of your swap space and where (Section 4.4.2) it ought to go. Divide up the remaining space for the three other partitions.

Example:

I start fdisk from the shell prompt:

# fdisk /dev/hdb

which indicates that I am using the second drive on my IDE controller. (See Section 2.1.) Now I need to plan my layout. In this example, I want to use only primary partitions for my linux partitions and my swap space. When I print the (empty) partition table, I just get configuration information.

Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/hdb: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 621 cylinders Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes

I knew that I had a 1.2Gb drive, but now I really know: 64 * 63 * 512 * 621 = 1281982464 bytes. I decide to reserve 128Mb of that space for swap, leaving 1153982464. If I use one of my primary partitions for swap, that means I have three left for ext2 partitions. Divided equally, that makes for 384Mb per partition. Now I get to work.

Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-621, default 1):<RETURN> Using default value 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-621, default 621): +384M

Next, I set up the partition I want to use for swap:

Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 2 First cylinder (197-621, default 197):<RETURN> Using default value 197 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (197-621, default 621): +128M

Now the partition table looks like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 1 196 395104 83 Linux /dev/hdb2 197 262 133056 83 Linux

I set up the remaining two partitions the same way I did the first. Finally, I make the first partition bootable:

Command (m for help): a Partition number (1-4): 1

And I make the second partition of type swap:

Command (m for help): t Partition number (1-4): 2 Hex code (type L to list codes): 82 Changed system type of partition 2 to 82 (Linux swap) Command (m for help): p

The end result:

Disk /dev/hdb: 64 heads, 63 sectors, 621 cylinders Units = cylinders of 4032 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 196 395104+ 83 Linux /dev/hdb2 197 262 133056 82 Linux swap /dev/hdb3 263 458 395136 83 Linux /dev/hdb4 459 621 328608 83 Linux

Finally, I issue the write command (w) to write the table on the disk.

For more information, see:

• Section 7.1

• Section 7

• Section 7.2

5.1.3. Mixed primary and logical partitions

The overview: create one use one of the primary partitions to house all the extra partitions. Then create logical partitions within it. Create the other primary partitions before or after creating the logical partitions.

Example:

I start fdisk from the shell prompt:

# fdisk /dev/sda

which indicates that I am using the first drive on my SCSI chain. (See Section 2.1.)

First I figure out how many partitions I want. I know my drive has a 183Gb capacity and I want 26Gb partitions (because I happen to have back-up tapes that are about that size).

183Gb / 26Gb = ~7

so I will need 7 partitions. Even though fdisk accepts partition sizes expressed in Mb and Kb, I decide to calculate the number of cylinders that will end up in each partition because fdisk reports start and stop points in cylinders. I see when I enter fdisk that I have 22800 cylinders.

> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 22800. There is > nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in > certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot > time (e.g., LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other > OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

So, 22800 total cylinders divided by seven partitions is 3258 cylinders. Each partition will be about 3258 cylinders long. I ignore the warning msg because this is not my boot drive (Section 4).

Since I have 4 primary partitions, 3 of them can be 3258 long. The extended partition will have to be (4 * 3258), or 13032, cylinders long in order to contain the 4 logical partitions.

I enter the following commands to set up the first of the 3 primary partitions (stuff I type is bold ):

Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-22800, default 1): <RETURN> Using default value 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-22800, default 22800): 3258

The last partition is the extended partition:

Partition number (1-4): 4 First cylinder (9775-22800, default 9775): <RETURN> Using default value 9775 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (9775-22800, default 22800): <RETURN> Using default value 22800

The result, when I issue the print table command is:

/dev/sda1 1 3258 26169853+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 3259 6516 26169885 83 Linux /dev/sda3 6517 9774 26169885 83 Linux /dev/sda4 9775 22800 104631345 5 Extended

Next I segment the extended partition into 4 logical partitions, starting with the first logical partition, into 3258-cylinder segments. The logical partitions automatically start from /dev/sda5.

Command (m for help): n First cylinder (9775-22800, default 9775): <RETURN> Using default value 9775 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (9775-22800, default 22800): 13032

The end result is:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 3258 26169853+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 3259 6516 26169885 83 Linux /dev/sda3 6517 9774 26169885 83 Linux /dev/sda4 9775 22800 104631345 5 Extended /dev/sda5 9775 13032 26169853+ 83 Linux /dev/sda6 13033 16290 26169853+ 83 Linux /dev/sda7 16291 19584 26459023+ 83 Linux /dev/sda8 19585 22800 25832488+ 83 Linux

Finally, I issue the write command (w) to write the table on the disk. To make the partitions usable, I will have to format (Section 7) each partition and then mount (Section 7.2) it.

5.1.4. Submitted Examples

I'd like to submit my partition layout, because it works well with any distribution of Linux (even big RPM based ones). I have one hard drive that ... is 10 gigs, exactly. Windows can't see above 9.3 gigs of it, but Linux can see it all, and use it all. It also has much more than 1024 cylenders.

I also noticed that you don't have any REAL examples of partition tables, and for newbies I HIGHLY suggest putting quite a few up. I'm freshly out of the newbie stage, and partitioning was what messed me up the most.

Valkor