Hacker News Reader

Comment by williebeek | Hacker News Reader

Remember when distros used complicated partition setups, one for /root, one for /var one for /home, a swap partition etc. Was always a bad choice because one of them would be at 99% while others would linger below 10%

For swap, the best advice is to disable swap on your desktop, unless <8GB RAM. Really, I've never needed it and you probably won't either.

View on HN

On the Desktop fine-grained partitioning is a bit questionable but on a server it's still quite practical. E.g. preventing the database or excessive logs from filling the disk space. The latter is also an attack vector actually.

Also generally swap is recommended on all systems. During normal use it should rarely be needed but if it's needed it prevents spurious crashes. E.g. make -j16 shouldn't result in a hard to comprehend crash because I miss 1 GB of RAM.

I tried that a few years ago. The result was worse than swapping. The kernel really tries its best not to kill anything, and you end up with "thrashing" again, where code pages (shared objects, executables, mmaped files) are evicted and need to be loaded again from disk. In practice the slowdown was worse than swapping to disk, and much more sudden. I'd recommend at least zram to soften the OOM landing.

Id always suggest at least 2-4G of swap even if you have plenty of memory 32g+ because for that rare edge case where you'd really not want to OOM.

Yep. Swap + zswap + earlyoom is a great safety need incase things get hairy.

> For swap, the best advice is to disable swap on your desktop, unless <8GB RAM.

That maybe reasonable advice if you never intend to hibernate your desktop. I like to shut my desktop down when I'm not using it, and it's nice to be able to quickly boot it back to the same state it was in when I went to bed.

I'm not sure if that's a bad choice... BTW, I think STIG still requires it. So, if you want to be compliant with some (US) government requirements, you'd still have to put different bits of your system on different partitions / devices.

Why I'm not sure this is a bad idea: a pathological process that quickly captures the entire allocated disk space will be contained by this layout and will likely not affect the system as a whole. Consider, for example, a process that excessively logs into /var/log: once the filesystem mounted at /var fills up, it might fail / hang, but you will still be able to use stuff from /bin or /sbin. But, if your entire root filesystem fills up, you probably won't be able to run any applications at all.

There are also controls that specify noexec, nodev etc for filesystems.

Agreed. Buy more RAM but these days that means taking a HELOC

> you probably won't either

Hibernation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com