What I do for a new machine?

[Dotan Cohen]

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 16:29, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't need /boot any more. It was useful about a decade or more
> ago when many BIOSes had limitations such as being unable to boot from
> cylinders on the hard disk numbered above 1024, or were unable to boot
> from sections above a certain size limit - at various times, there
> were limitations above 32MB, 512MB, 8GB, 32GB and 120GB.
>
> Now, don't worry about it.
>
> You need / and swap. Having /home as well is useful.
>
> For / - depending on the size of your disk - 16GB is generous and 32GB
> is massive. For swap, use 2× the amount of physical RAM, as a
> guideline. That is very generous. All the rest of the space you can
> give to /home.
>

Hi Liam! If we are getting rid of outdated practices, such as a
separate /boot partition, then another practice that should go is to
double the RAM for the swap partition. Enough SWAP to hold the RAM for
hibernate/sleep is enough. I can think of no case in which someone
will be swapping GiBs! At that point it will take so long to read the
swap that the machine will be useless anyway.

I would love to hear counter opinions. Has anyone ever (desktop /
server) ever swapped over 2 GiB?

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://gibberish.co.il
http://what-is-what.com