Manual Partitioning for a Gaming / Multimedia PC

[Monti]

Hi,

I have never done a manual partitioning setup for a BSD OS, so I am wondering if someone could please give me some general directions for what would be reasonable sizes for each partition. Besides of some games and a lot of music/video files and pictures I would also like to install for example Blender 3D.

The hardware setup is a 500GB hard drive and 8GB of RAM.

I have seen a default partition order which displayed " / , SWAP , /var , and /usr " , but I am thinking that having a separate /home would be good. So maybe 5 partitions.....?

If someone could please tell me what the needed sizes should be for the system related partitions with the presented scenario I would really appreciate it. That would also be taking into account that there would be some additional programs being installed in the future. I am thinking that half of the RAM amount would be more than enough for the SWAP.


Second, I am wondering what the different UFS options means. More specifically UFS+S and UFS+J. I have read that the UFS+SUJ option is the default filesystem type as it virtually eliminates the need to run fsck, and that this version of UFS adds a light version of journaling to Soft Updates (the one developed for FreeBSD by Kirk McKusick ? ) to prevent data loss in the unfortunate event of a sudden system shutdown.


Thanks

[bsdkeith]

The root partition (/) size will depend on the size of the installation. I know this doesn't sound very helpful, but no body but you knows how many extras you will be installing.

If you are going to have /, swap, & /home, your / partition needs to be able to handle the OS & everything else you want to install.

If you are going to have /, swap, /usr, & /home, then / can be as little as 3GB, as it will only hold the OS & all other programs will install to /usr, (usually /usr/local/bin).

In your case I think something like 5GB /, your choice of swap, /usr enough to hold 2GB plus your estimate of extras, the rest as /home for your files (music, movies, etc).

Hope that helps.

[Monti]

Thanks a lot Keith. I really appreciate it. I'm starting to see the picture now.

I was not aware that one could actually choose a " / , SWAP, /home " configuration. Makes things easier, so good to know. Except from a hidden backup partition at the end of the drive, this is the setup I used with MS Windows and then with GNU/Linux also.

Just for the record I found these guides over at FreeBSD:
2.6. Allocating Disk Space: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bs ... oning.html
4.5. Directory Structure: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/dirstructure.html


Regarding UFS+SUJ, is it so that this has become the "standard" where nobody cares about UFS+S and UFS+J? I am guessing that UFS+SUJ means "UFS plus Soft Updates "Light" Journaling". If not please correct me.

I have tried to find some useful information about UFS+S and UFS+J, but I have not been successful in doing so. I am wondering if UFS+S means just "UFS plus Soft Updates" and if UFS+J means "UFS plus Journaling"? It would have been nice to have a better understanding of the different choices, also as in pros and cons. If anyone have a link I would have appreciated it.

Thanks

[Monti]

Just for the record I now know that there is no +S and +U. SU together stands for Soft Updates and is applied when using the -U switch with newfs(8) . Regarding +SUJ wblock@ over at FreeBSD writes in his SSD disk setup guide why he is not using Soft Updates Journaling, and only SU (newfs -U):

Soft updates journaling (SUJ) is not used for two reasons: there have been problems with SUJ that prevent the use of dump(8) to back up filesystems, and SUJ’s killer feature is dramatically reduced fsck(8) times. But SSDs provide dramatically reduced fsck(8) times anyway.

Link: http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/ssd.html