Andrew Brown wrote:

> >...
> >given machine and no time to repartition.  The primary advantage of small
> >roots, in the old days, was that you could boot off tape, read a quick root
> >filesystem and be up and going on a disk quickly.  Now, with the advent of
> >...
> 
> just for hysterical reference, the old sunos 4.1.3 default
> installation did just that: gave you a really small root partition.
> it was about 15 megs.  which dosn't fit much of anything except what
> it absolutely positively needs.  god help you if your aliases database
> or password files got too large.

We have our Ultrix boxes set up like this; mainly because Ultrix
supports a "clean fsck" but not on a mounted filesystem (and Ultrix
doesn't support "mount -u" so / comes up mounted read/write).  So we
have an as small as possible root filesystem so that it fsck's quickly
and then /usr and /var which don't get fsck'd on boot (except Ultrix
sometimes forgets that it's clean anyway ;).

On my NetBSD (and Solaris) machines, it's just root, /var and swap (and
a separate /var/mail where needed).

Simon.