Messages in this thread | | | From | Lyle Seaman <> | Subject | RE: Volume Managers in Linux | Date | Wed, 4 Nov 1998 09:27:16 -0500 |
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> Please, Can anoyone explain to me why you want to create separate > filesystems for > / /usr /tmp/ /var /home. I really cant find any use for this! and I am > speking > from over 10 yrs of experinece with lost of different unix systems > here. And what > I want is reliable systems that dont fail because some filesystem that > went full. > > This is to me just something we do out of old habit but no one I have > argued over > this has any good reason why you should do this.
Once upon a time, kernels and filesystems had a few more bugs than presently (hence more crashes), disks weren't as reliable (hence more data loss), and they were slower (fsck took forever). That's where the "old habit" came from. Many times, each of those filesystems lived on its own (256 MB!) disk pack.
While these factors are less important lately, they still exist. I've recently worked with critical file servers that would take 20 minutes to fsck, and if they had a simple, single filesystem, they would take hours.
These arguments are relevant for the "MD/LVM" vs "lots of filesystems" debate. In the multi-disk,single filesystem configuration (w/o RAID) the loss of a single disk (due to hardware failure, for instance) will cause all your data to be lost, and you must restore it all from backup.
It boils down to an admin's decision to trade off one inconvenience for another. I agree that for naive newbies, the fewer partitions, the better, until they gain the skill to manage multiple partitions successfully.
Newer technologies, which are rapidly gaining acceptance, may change some of these tradeoffs, but we're not quite there yet.
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