5326bef3de
This looks like it was developed offline, and is being spammed over the top of the existing. "That's fine by me! I dont really care how you do it, just get it in there..." said Jordan in a conversation a short while ago...
123 lines
5.7 KiB
Plaintext
123 lines
5.7 KiB
Plaintext
This is the FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor.
|
|
|
|
You should use this editor to create at least the following
|
|
filesystems:
|
|
|
|
Name Purpose Min Size? Optional?
|
|
---- ------- --------- ---------
|
|
/ Root filesystem 20MB No
|
|
swap Swap space 2 * MEM No
|
|
/usr System & user files 80MB or more Yes
|
|
|
|
Note: If you do not create a /usr filesystem then your / filesystem
|
|
will need to be bigger - at least 100MB. This is not recommended as
|
|
any media errors that may occur during disk I/O to user files will
|
|
corrupt the filesystem containing vital system files as well. It is
|
|
for this reason that / is generally kept on its own filesystem, where
|
|
it's basically considered "read only" by the system and hence a good
|
|
deal safer.
|
|
|
|
Swap space is a little tricker, and the rule of "2 * MEM" is simply a
|
|
best-guess approximation and not necessarily accurate for your
|
|
intended usage of the system. If you intend to use the system heavily
|
|
in a server or multi-user application, you may be well advised to
|
|
increase this size. You may also create swap space on multiple drives
|
|
for a larger "total" swap and this is, in fact, recommended if you
|
|
have multiple, fast drives for which such load-balancing can only help
|
|
overall I/O performance.
|
|
|
|
The /usr filesystem should be sized according to what kind of
|
|
distributions you're trying to load and how many packages you intend
|
|
to install in locations like /usr/local. You can also make /usr/local
|
|
a separate filesystem if you don't want to risk filling up your /usr
|
|
by mistake.
|
|
|
|
Another useful filesystem to create is /var, which contains mail, news
|
|
printer spool files and other temporary items. It is a popular
|
|
candidate for a separate paritition and should be sized according to
|
|
your estimates of the amount of mail, news or spooled print jobs that
|
|
may be stored there.
|
|
|
|
WARNING: If you do not create a separate filesystem for /var, space
|
|
for such files will be allocated out of the root (/) filesystem
|
|
instead. You may therefore wish to make the / partition bigger if you
|
|
expect a lot of mail or news and do not want to make /var its own
|
|
partition.
|
|
|
|
|
|
If you're new to this installation, you should also first understand
|
|
how FreeBSD 2.0.5's new "slices" paradigm for looking at disk storage
|
|
works. It's not very hard to grasp. A "fully qualified slice name",
|
|
that is the name of the file we open in /dev to talk to the slice, is
|
|
optionally broken into 3 parts:
|
|
|
|
First you have the disk name. Assume we have two SCSI
|
|
drives in our system, which gives us `sd0' and `sd1'.
|
|
|
|
Next you have the "Slice" (or "FDISK Partition") number,
|
|
as seen in the Partition Editor. Assume that our sd0 contains
|
|
two slices, a FreeBSD slice and a DOS slice. This gives us
|
|
sd0s1 and sd0s2. Let's also say that sd1 is completely devoted
|
|
to FreeBSD, so we have only one slice there: sd1s1.
|
|
|
|
Next, if a slice is a FreeBSD slice, you have a number of
|
|
(confusingly named) "partitions" you can put inside of it.
|
|
These FreeBSD partitions are where various filesystems or swap
|
|
areas live, and using our hypothetical two-SCSI-disk machine
|
|
again, we might have something like the following layout on sd0:
|
|
|
|
Name Mountpoint
|
|
---- ----------
|
|
sd0s1a /
|
|
sd0s1b <swap space>
|
|
sd0s1e /usr
|
|
|
|
Because of historical convention, there is also a short-cut,
|
|
or "compatibility slice", that is maintained for easy access
|
|
to the first FreeBSD slice on a disk for those programs which
|
|
still don't know how to deal with the new slice scheme.
|
|
The compatibility slice names for our filesystem above would
|
|
look like:
|
|
|
|
Name Mountpoint
|
|
---- ----------
|
|
sd0a /
|
|
sd0b <swap space>
|
|
sd0e /usr
|
|
|
|
FreeBSD automatically maps the compatibility slice to the first
|
|
FreeBSD slice it finds (in this case, sd0s1). You may have multiple
|
|
FreeBSD slices on a drive, but only the first one may be the
|
|
compatibility slice!
|
|
|
|
The compatibility slice will eventually be phased out, but
|
|
it is still important right now for several reasons:
|
|
|
|
1. Some programs, as mentioned before, still don't work
|
|
with the slice paradigm and need time to catch up.
|
|
|
|
2. The FreeBSD boot blocks are unable to look for
|
|
a root file system in anything but a compatibility
|
|
slice right now. This means that our root will always
|
|
show up on "sd0a" in the above scenario, even though
|
|
it really lives over on sd0s1a and would otherwise be
|
|
referred to by its full slice name.
|
|
|
|
Once you understand all this, then the label editor becomes fairly
|
|
simple. You're either carving up the FreeBSD slices displayed at the
|
|
top of the screen into smaller pieces (displayed in the middle of the
|
|
screen) and then putting FreeBSD file systems on them, Or you're just
|
|
mounting existing partitions/slices into your filesystem hierarchy;
|
|
this editor lets you do both. Since a DOS partition is also just
|
|
another slice as far as FreeBSD is concerned, you can mount one into
|
|
in your filesystem hierarchy just as easily with this editor. For
|
|
FreeBSD partitions you can also toggle the "newfs" state so that
|
|
the partitions are either (re)created from scratch or simply checked
|
|
and mounted (the contents are preserved).
|
|
|
|
When you're done, type `Q' to exit.
|
|
|
|
No actual changes will be made to the disk until you (C)ommit from the
|
|
Install menu! You're working with what is essentially a copy of
|
|
the disk label(s), both here and in the FDISK Partition Editor.
|