Pierfrancesco Caci wrote: [...] > I've a machine with 64 MB ram, 1 swap partition of about 32 MB (made > like that when I only had 32 MB ram) 1 swap file of 127 MB (it doesn't > take 128 MB, you must put something less). [...]
If you really want to know why this is (probably not), partition sizes are actually specified in cylinders. It is possible to define partition boundaries that do not lie on cylinder boundaries, but this can be very dangerous and most partitioning software only lets you do this with the 'expert options' or something similar. Most disks have a geometry that is something like <num cylinders> x 255 heads x 16 sectors x 512 bytes per sector. So the size of one cylinder is going to be 255x16x512, which is 2,088,960 bytes. Thus all of your partition sizes are going to be multiples of that, and the closest multiple to 128MB is 127,426,560 bytes. While not as important with ext2fs Linux and FAT32/Win, it's a good idea to size your partitions to the closest cylinder that resides under the power of 2 mark (<31MB, <63MB, <511MB, etc) for minimal cluster sizes and minimal disk space wastage. Even though newer filesystems like ext2fs and FAT32 typically use 4k inodes or clusters, if you have 8GB partitions then there's going to be an incredible amount of clusters or accounting information and this will lower performance so it's good to use multiple, smaller partitions anyways for this reason and all the other reasons for using seperate /var, /tmp, etc. partitions. Christopher
