On Tue, 2001-12-11 at 15:11, Kent West wrote: > There are two basic reasons for having extra partitions: reliability, and > security.
The other day I read that it's /not/ recommended to partition a single disk too much, since the kernel would not handle that well: it would read/write the partitions alternating, leading to a lot of unnecessary head movement and performance degradation. I'm sort of a control freak too (as far as my computers are concerned) and have my disk(s) partitioned for years with for /var, /tmp, /, /home. Now I'm deeply worried when I think of all the performance lost ;o). I never heard of that kernel problem before, and I don't know if it's true. Hopefully someone who knows will comments on that. Anyway, a /var and/or /tmp partition won't probably hurt much, /usr and /usr/lib may be a different story. OTOH, Debian needs a /big/ /var when upgrading the dist, and /tmp at times also needs a lot of space (printing big pix, ...), so for a desktop system a 100 MB partition for / and 50 for /boot with the rest unpartitioned probably is now bad idea either. -- I did not vote for the Austrian government
