On Tue, 24 May 2005 18:44:02 +0000 (UTC)
Martijn van Buul <martijnb@atlas.ipv6.stack.nl> wrote:


> I've had really bad experiences with it, from my early NetBSD days (1.5-era).
> I wouldn't know if it is still valid, but back then a rootfs with softdep
> would invariably receive lethal damage at the first crash. So I took on the
> rule of never having a softdep /. And, like Gary said:
> 
I'm not sure about other ports, but at least on i386 and sparc64 running NetBSD-3.0_BETA softdep is solid as a rock. I've never had any problems with it.

> >> I honestly don't see what you'd gain from it. Most of the data on / never
> >> really gets changed, unlike /var or /tmp for example.
> >> 
> > I setup up NetBSD with only one slice so everything is on wd0a
> 
> Now there's a bad idea, if you ask me. I really don't see the benefit of
> doing that - aside from a "I really don't want to think about how my
> partitions will work out". Honestly, it's a Linuxish thing to do, and there's
> little to gain from it. In these days of multi-gigabyte harddisks, it's
> not a bad thing to have a small root (I usually have 256 MB, but my main
> desktop is using only 33 MB of that..), a suitably sized var (heavily
> dependant on what role the machine is going to have, but 256 MB will do
> just fine for desktop usage. Add more if you're planning to receive mail) and
> the rest in /usr - including homedirs.
Having one huge / partition is pretty sane if it's just a desktop machine. For servers you break up your disk into several partitions to improve security/performance/fault tolerance, depending on your setup. Then you can mount those partitions with various falgs: nosuid, noatime, rdonly, noexec and so on. It also helps to take backups of your data if partitions are of the same size as the capacity of your tapes.