Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.
I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:
- FAT32: EFI
- BTRFS:
/ - Swap: Swap
- Ext4:
/home
I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.
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Well technically, if you’re using BTRFS, you might want to check out subvolumes. Here’s my subvolume setup:
- Subvolume 1, named
(root subvol) - Subvolume 2, named
@home(/home subvol) - Subvolume 3, named
(/srv subvol) - Subvolume 4, named
(/opt subvol) - Subvolume 5, named
(which is - you guessed it - the swap subvol)
You then set up fstab to reflect each of the subvolumes, using the
subvol=option. Here’s the kicker: they are all in one partition. Yes, even the swap. Though caveat, swap still has to be a swapfile, but in its own separate subvolume. Don’t ask me why, it’s just the way to do it.The great thing about subvolumes is that it doesn’t do any size provisioning, unless specified by the user. All subvolumes share the space available within the partition. This means you won’t have to do any soul searching when setting up the partitions regarding use of space.
This also means that if I want to nuke and pave, I only need run a BTRFS command on my
subvolume (which contains/usr,/share,/bin), because it won’t be touching the contents of@home,, or. What’s extra cool here is that I’ll lose 0% FS metadata or permission setup, since you’re technically just disassociating some blocks from a subvolume. You’re not really “formatting”… which is neat as hell.The only extra partitions I have is the EFI partition and an EXT4 partition for the
/bootfolder since I use LUKS2.Thanks I think this is the answer I was looking for!
How does that work with you’re installing a new system? Do the subvolumes just show up like partitions?
In tools like
lsblk? Nope. They appear as directories, usually in the top-level subvolume, which typically isn’t mounted anywhere in the system.Then you just create mount entries in
/etc/fstabjust like you would with partitions, this time just using thesubvol=option as mentioned above. I don’t know if there are any installers that do this for you. Archwiki – as usual – has good documentation on this.So, it doesn’t sound like it would be useful for me, since the reason why I have separate partitions in the first place is so that I can re-install a distro or install a new distro without having to back up
/homefirst.
Have you had any luck with hibernation with a BTRFS swapfile? My computer still does not start from hibernation, and I am not sure why, even though I followed the Arch wiki to set it up.
Can’t say I have. Haven’t used hibernation mode for years even. Sleep mode is just too good nowadays for me to use it, so I guess we could chalk that up to a fault of the setup.
According to ReadTheDocs (BTRFS, swapfile) it’s possible under certain circumstances, but requires the 6.1 kernel to do it in a relatively easy way.
- Subvolume 1, named
Shrug. To me this is like arguing over how to fold your underwear.
Not at all? Just throw it into one big drawer?
I don’t like wasting space or having to predict how much space I’ll be using two years from now, so I prefer the minimum of partitions: efi, boot, and system(luks), with a btrfs subvol for /, home, and swapfile.
what you’re doing is perfectly fine. if it’s what your comfortable with, there’s no ‘need’ to change.
I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups.
Even with a single partition for
/and/homeyou can keep the contents of/homeduring a reinstall by simple not formatting the partitions again. I know when I tried years ago with Ubuntu years ago the installed asked if I wanted to remove the system folders for you. But even if the installer does not you can delete them manually before hand. Installers wont touch/homecontents if you don’t format the drive (or any files outside the system folders they care about).Though I would still backup everything inside
/homebefore any attempt at a reinstall as mistakes do happen no matter what process you decide to go with.Am I doing something wrong? Not seeing a particular option? I have never seen or experienced what you’re describing.
I just use /
I don’t think having a swap partition or file would be all that useful because I have plenty of memory. I’ve never had to reinstall Linux so I’m not sure why I would need a separate home. If I did bork my OS somehow I’m fairly confident I could repair it from a live distro. And even if I did end up having to save my home I could just copy the files I want to another drive if it really came to that.
In this case you could view a swap partition as a safety net. Put 20-30GB in a swap partition in case something goes wrong. You won’t miss the disk space.
why not zram as a safety net?
I’ve never understood why people run without swap. There’s basically no downside to having it. If you’re running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you’re on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you’re probably not in an “ample RAM” situation anyway.
Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?
I have 64GB of RAM and 8GB of VRAM, I only have a TB of storage. The only time I’ve ever filled up my RAM is due to memory leak.
This is the way
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If you reinstall often a separate /home makes some sense. Otherwise it’s probably pointless. I’d try to get to a point where I don’t have to reinstall my base OS and invest in an automatic backup solution.
It’s not wrong, as such, but simply not right. Since you’re using btrfs, having a separate partition for home makes little sense. I, personally, also prefer using a swapfile to a swap partition, but that’s potato/potato.
Alright, but actually I don’t think I’m maximizing my use of btrfs. I only use btrfs because of its compatibility with Linux Mint’s Timeshift tool. Would you be implying if I used btrfs for the whole partition, I can reinstall
/without overwriting/home?BTRFS has a concept called a subvolume. You are allowed to mount it just like any other device. This is an example
/etc/fstabI’ve copied from somewhere some time ago.UUID=49DD-6B6F /efi vfat defaults 0 2 UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96 / btrfs subvol=@root 0 0 UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96 /home btrfs subvol=@home 0 0 UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96 /opt btrfs subvol=@opt 0 0 UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96 /srv btrfs subvol=@srv 0 0 UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96 /var btrfs subvol=@var 0 0/efi(or/boot, or/boot/efi, whatever floats your boat) still has to be a separate vfat partition, but all the other mounts are, technically speaking, the same partition mounted many times with a different subvolume set as the target.Obviously, you don’t need to have all of them separated like this, but it allows you to fine tune the parts of system that do get snapshot.
How about when I need to reinstall the OS? Will overwriting
/not touch/homelike with my current set up?I don’t know how mint installer works, but ideally you’re never really writing to
/of the filesystem to begin with. You always do a subvolume and manipulate that.
What you’re doing is perfectly fine.
It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved
/home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.
That’s the standard way. It’s how (most) distros partition by default.
Really? Default for Linux Mint has
/and/homein one partition. So reinstalling erases/homeas well.Yes, but afaik, in the installer there is at least the option to select a separate home partition.
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You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.
Butterface excels at keeping data safe-ish or at least lets you know when to throw in the towel, and which bits you’ve lost. It’s also write intensive if you open a file with write permissions, which is harder on your drives.
Btrfs is great for the data you want to keep long term.
Also UEFI has some nice advantages if your computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.
Do what works for you, and keep on keeping on.
You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.
This. Too many partitions for a home system can get pretty stupid pretty quick. But OP has just the right amount of separation between system and data. I’ve known people that were uncomfortable without breaking /var (or /var/log) off into its own partition, but that’s really overkill for a stable, personal system, IMO.
computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.
I feel personally called out by this statement!
Seriously, the big one for me, is that I like having drive encryption. It protects my computer and data should it fall into the hands of, say, burglers. I also like turning it up to the elevens simply because I’m a bit TOO paranoid. You really need more than 1GB of ram to do argon2id key derivation, which is what fde is all moving to for unlocking purposes, and BIOS just can’t do that. My main workstation is using a powerful, but older mobo with gigabyte’s old, horrid faux EFI support.
Another good one for the security-conscientious person is Secure Boot, meaning that you control what kernels and bootloading code is allowed to boot on your computer, preventing Evil Maid-type attacks: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
That’s pretty far fetched, but maybe not too out of the question if you, say, work for a bank or accountant.
Of course none of that matters if you don’t practice good operational security.
I’d use sister partitions for everything but swap, just use zram for swap, it’s faster and doesn’t need it’s own separate partition
All fine though I would recommend you look into lvm, gives you easier control over sizing and resizing, even online.
Isn’t it better to use btrfs nowadays?
I’m also old-school lvm person, but I put btrfs in my Gentoo desktop, though I don’t actually utilize it at all.
Yes and no
Btrfs is awesome and awful at the same time, and it’s a complicated story. It was rather ill-defined at the beginning and took a LONG time to get anywhere.
Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a pretty awesome filesystem right now and I use it for all my storage drives. Having said that, i still use ext4 with lvm on my system drives and evenrnmy btrfs drives have lvm under them
