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Re: BSD disklabel partition letters in NetBSD



On 9/24/2018 12:34 PM, Rocky Hotas wrote:
I like to mount /var on 'e', /usr on 'f', /usr/pkg on 'g' (picking up on
the g in pkG as a mnemonic), /home on 'h', /Sources on 'i', /Playpen on 'j'
and /Archive on 'k' (the hard ch as a mnemonic for the k) with /Leftovers
for 'l'.

This is a very clever way to remember the partitions, and also to make them
uniform across several different disks.

I don't want to have to keep notes as to how each machine is (was!)
configured.  So, it's easier for me to just standardize on an approach
and commit THAT to memory.

By putting the "extra" partitions up high, it lets me adapt the same
general layout to systems that only support 8 partitions (/home being
the last -- 'h' -- partition, in those cases).

Having a separate partition for /var helps if some process goes wonky
and starts to fill the /var "directory" (in the case when /var is part
of the / partition).  I can get to single user (which almost always
means the offending process is not running) and work with a / partition
that isn't overfull with all that /var cruft -- which has been preserved
on the /var *partition*, if I want to examine it)

I don't know if any architectures (Sun?) still have requirements
as to where the / partition must reside "physically", on the medium.
I always lay the partitions out consecutively and contiguously
just cuz it makes the arithmetic more straightforward.

[There are (?) also some issues wrt sector alignment if you're using
drives with 4K sectors -- though I think those are only performance
related (??)]


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