Partitioning your drive is something that basically everyone on Linux does but what purpose does it actually serve and is there any reason why it might be better to avoid creating partitions in your d...
I would much rather split out /home if I’m going to split anything, so it can go through a future reinstall more smoothly. With /var being a more distant second candidate, because I’ve been burnt on several occasions by various programs eating up all disk space somewhere under it.
If you want to be compliant to the UEFI spec, the partition holding your EFI binaries must be formatted as a file system related to FAT (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition). This is not something you want for you system drive, so a separate partition makes sense.
They can be the same partition, they are for different purposes though. EFI holds the EFI binaries as the name implies, while /boot holds the initrd, kernel, and the bootloader config files.
If they are the same partition, /boot needs to be formatted as FAT32 and have EFI as a subdirectory. Otherwise they can be separate partitions, either way the partition that contains the EFI directory needs to be formatted as FAT32.
Hey it’s the one person who did what who is yet to have their home or / partition run out then realise they can’t expand it without formatting over the other /s
But seriously just /boot as a separate partition because it’s a fairly constant & known size, and allows you to make it be a simpler filesystem which helps with recovery, both because if the bootloader dies you can both easily access and recover the /boot partition most of the time, unlike with more complex/bigger filesystems, and you can have a journaling filesystem like xfs or btrfs on your main partition which reduces the chances of things being corrupted, generally meaning you won’t need to reinstall
That said if you want to change distro or something you can keep your home directory via a delicate dance with chroot which is the one thing /home may be good for avoiding, but you’ll likely break all your configs etc either way
I use borg to take snapshots from / and /home because I can be selective (it has include and exclude patterns, like rsync). Also because it does deduplication (at file and chunk level too, saves a ton of space) and compression. And of course a big factor is that I can keep the backups somewhere else.
I’ve looked into zfs snapshots but they seem really limited in comparison. Good for recovering accidental deletes or changes if you catch on soon enough, but not very useful otherwise.
/ and /boot are (arguably) all you need on a single disk system
But why
/boot?I would much rather split out
/homeif I’m going to split anything, so it can go through a future reinstall more smoothly. With/varbeing a more distant second candidate, because I’ve been burnt on several occasions by various programs eating up all disk space somewhere under it.If you want to be compliant to the UEFI spec, the partition holding your EFI binaries must be formatted as a file system related to FAT (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition). This is not something you want for you system drive, so a separate partition makes sense.
Isn’t EFI a separate partition? Different from
/boot?They can be the same partition, they are for different purposes though. EFI holds the EFI binaries as the name implies, while /boot holds the initrd, kernel, and the bootloader config files.
If they are the same partition, /boot needs to be formatted as FAT32 and have EFI as a subdirectory. Otherwise they can be separate partitions, either way the partition that contains the EFI directory needs to be formatted as FAT32.
For EFI probably.
Its best practice to just split out /efi in that case
Hey it’s the one person who did what who is yet to have their home or / partition run out then realise they can’t expand it without formatting over the other /s
But seriously just /boot as a separate partition because it’s a fairly constant & known size, and allows you to make it be a simpler filesystem which helps with recovery, both because if the bootloader dies you can both easily access and recover the /boot partition most of the time, unlike with more complex/bigger filesystems, and you can have a journaling filesystem like xfs or btrfs on your main partition which reduces the chances of things being corrupted, generally meaning you won’t need to reinstall
That said if you want to change distro or something you can keep your home directory via a delicate dance with chroot which is the one thing /home may be good for avoiding, but you’ll likely break all your configs etc either way
I keep / and /home on a btrfs subvolumes, so I do not have to think about their sizes and also can do snapshots.
How do btrfs snapshots work?
I use borg to take snapshots from / and /home because I can be selective (it has include and exclude patterns, like rsync). Also because it does deduplication (at file and chunk level too, saves a ton of space) and compression. And of course a big factor is that I can keep the backups somewhere else.
I’ve looked into zfs snapshots but they seem really limited in comparison. Good for recovering accidental deletes or changes if you catch on soon enough, but not very useful otherwise.
Unless you need to dual-boot.