dan@rna.UUCP (02/11/84)
I would tend to favor your suggestion of 3*100Mb partitions on the Eagle. In fact that is exactly what I did. I think a major reason Berkeley went with the large partitions is to standardize disk partitions across different drives with a consistant partition rules. We only have Eagles on our VAXes and I wanted to optimize our daily operations with the disks rather than once in a year transfers between different drives. In practice, we have found it very useful to have very few disk partition sizes so that raw copies of filesystems between partitions were possible. I have filled up our Eagles with so much source that it becomes very nice to swap out a little used source partition from time to time with raw copying. Here is our current partition scheme, we run 4.2BSD on the Eagle... cyl sectors hp?a 17 16320 root hp?b 34 32640 swap hp?c 842 808320 entire disk hp?d 17 16320 /tmp hp?e 17 16320 /usr/spool hp?f 252 241920 /usr hp?g 252 241920 /usr1 users hp?h 252 241920 /src source The distribute root filesystem, hp?a remains the same (15884 sectors), but the disk partition table has been rounded to whole cylinders to make dd and fsck happy. There are only two partition sizes used for filesystems. Moving things around with dd is simple. hp[abdefgh] map the whole disk minus one cylinder. I chose to hide the last cylinder where the bad sector table resides from any filesystem partition so it will never get clobbered by mistake. I lose a few hundred sectors, .1% Filesystems /tmp and /usr/spool live by themselves in small partitions. Corruption cannot spread. The larger size, 241920, fits comfortably on a single 6250bpi tape. You can add a small guy on the tape's end. With 4.2BSD, you can decide on filesystem blocking parameters on a per filesystem basis. I just like the idea of file usage, performance and problems contained within a stereotyped partition. Comments? Cheers, Dan Ts'o ...cmcl2!rna!dan