this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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I've had a full /var partition cause all sorts of problems using the system. But I still think it's good to have four partitions /, /var, /tmp, and /home. At least split out /home so you can format / without losing your stuff in /home.
I think it is better to partition /usr (and /usr/local) too, for stability and security
I can definitely see doing that on a server many people are using. For my personal server, I used to do that, but in the end I couldn't find much benefit, and only headache ("ahhhh / is short on space because I forgot to clean up old kernels...").
I think it would save you someday, when there is nothing writing in /usr so the writing in /home would not cause much damage. On a system with a huge root partition, an incomplete writing might damage the whole filesystem.
Fsck would be faster. newfs (mkfs) would be faster. I found NetBSD spend so much time when it do newfs a 32G root partition (installing NetBSD in hyper-v).
Also for the /tmp partition, we can use memory filesystem (tmpfs) if we have 4G of RAM or more, instead of physical disk to store things that are cleaned on reboot.
I'm not saying it can't happen, but I've been using Linux since the late 90s and have never had a problem with an incomplete write damaging the file system, or really anything else (except for a recent incident when a new motherboard decided to overwrite the partition tables on my RAID5 array, but that's a different story). And I have UPSs on the server and desktop, and of course the laptop has a battery in it, so the risk of sudden power loss is extremely low.
The /tmp thing in RAM is interesting. I was reconfiguring my server's drive the other day, because I didn't originally allocate enough space to /var - it worked fine for years until I started playing with plex, jellyfin, and Home Assistant (the latter due to the database size). I was shocked to find /tmp only had a few files in it, after running for years. I think I switched the server to Debian in 2018 or 2019, but that's just a guess based on the file dates I'm seeing. Maybe Debian cleans the /tmp partition regularly.