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Partitioning guidelines

Boot (/boot)

768 MB–1 GB, at minimum. This is enough to contain several kernels as well as a bootable ISO (i.e. grml) for use with grub2.

Root (/)

For servers, a 4 GB partition is more than adequate. Most of my servers have less than 1 GB utilization.

For desktops/laptops, 8 GB is adequate for a machine with a set purpose and just running a desktop environment, while doing no/minimal development.

For a development workstation 10 GB or more is good. I always run out of space attempting to install debug packages and/or compile large software collections, such as KDE.

Logs (/var)

Space requirements for /var are always increasing. At minimum, 4 GB. If /var and /tmp are merged, 6 GB.

Temp (/tmp)

For servers, I notice /tmp is not used often, and usually lies empty. When it does it used, the frequency of use is similar to /var. I'll usually merge tmp and var for this reason (i.e. remount /tmp under /var/tmp).

For desktops, 2-4G is usually fine. I usually aim for the minimum required to store a CD or DVD image when burning discs.

Create and use a swap file

Instead of letting space go to waste in a swap partition, Linux can use a small swap file instead:

   1 sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap-file bs=1M count=255
   2 sudo mkswap /swap-file
   3 sudo swapon /swap-file

To automatically bring it up on reboot, place into fstab:

/swap-file none swap sw 0 0

Note: The Linux kernel does not support sparse files as swap files. It's also best to create the swap file immediately after filesystem creation to insure a contigiuous file. Other than that, choice of filesystem does not matter. Reference on LKML.

Clone a partition table

sfdisk can duplicate a partition table across disks. Useful for setting up RAID.

sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb

CategoryCheatSheet