Installing with separate /home partition & bug #150670

Sat Feb 28 02:28:35 UTC 2009

Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 13:59 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 13:35:49 -0800,
>>>   Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 15:25 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>>>>> You might need to be smarter than that. I have a lot installed (including
>>>>> some rpmfusion stuff), but hardly everything and my / is close to 40 GB.
>>>> That's really rather big. How'd you hit that? Are you sure you don't
>>>> have some specific thing taking up a lot of space? What's du or baobab
>>>> or something tell you?
>>> I have all of the different language stuff installed which adds quite a
>>> bit. I don't actually use anything except English, but I like to check
>>> for conflicts, as occasionally there will be conflicts that only appear
>>> in a subpackage for a specific language.
>>>
>> games are something you'd see on a desktop install and those can take up
>> quite a bit of room.
> 
> Also consider how much free space you need on / to perform a
> "preupgrade". Hint: a lot.
> 
> I really don't think automatically splitting /home is a good idea. Any
> heuristic is just that, heuristic. It's inevitably going to fail in some
> cases. The kind of people who just go with defaults are just the kind of
> Aunt Tillie's we don't want hitting such heuristic failures. Those smart
> enough to size / for their intended purpose aren't the ones using
> defaults.
> 

Separating '/' & /home on a 16gb netbook isn't going to be a good idea.
For most use cases where HD size is reasonable, I say we agree on a
Fedora Recommended Minimum Install Size.

I'm suggesting 20gb for this size & 40Gb for threshold. I'm completely
open to these actual numbers being changed.

* Any HD over a certain size default partition has '/' at this size,
with /home getting rest of space.
* This size is documemnted in release notes & install guide.
* What's on /tmp or /var is intelligently managed by default. Clear out
stuff after is is no longer needed/useful. If program is going to fill
'/', offer to clear out /tmp or /var/cache/yum, etc.
* Is considered when developing features like preupgrade, etc.
* Should be large enough to not be increased for a number of years.

My Proposal
===========
Below threshold, '/' & /home on one partition.
Above threshold, '/' is recommended minimum size we come up with, home
gets rest.
Remember I'm just talking about the default action. No-one is stopping
you from doing your custom partitioning. I just think that changing the
current default to this proposal would be a great improvement.

What Size Should We Recommend for '/' when '/home' is separate?
============================================================
As I see it, size needed breaks down to:
* size of stuff installed.
* size for downloading updates, /var/cache/yum, or new *.iso.
* size in /tmp for DVD burning, ripping etc. (I assume
k3b/brasero/nautilu-cd-creator,etc use /tmp for this?)
* reasonable size for '/tmp' & '/var' to grow.

I'm suggesting 20Gb (don't know why my brain needs such a round number,
and not 19 or 21???). Based on 8Gb for install, 5Gb for updates, 5Gb for
  /tmp, 2Gb for growth. I think all these numbers are on the generous
size for what is needed.

Let's go through each one separately.
* INSTALL.
Default F10 DVD install uses 3.3G.
F10 DVD install with all "groups" & languages ticked (didn't tick
optional packages): 6.5G.
Round this up to 7 or 8Gb sounds pretty safe?

* UPDATES.
Since maximum support time for an install is around 13 months, the user
is going to need to download updates. This will either be normal updates
or live upgrade through yum (both into /var/cache/yum), preupgrade,
(/var/cache/yum/preupgrade), or download an *.iso.

SYS-UPDATES
I did a fresh F9 default DVD install, and then checked how much need to
download to update system.
update fresh F9-DVD-default: 714Mb
update fresh F10-DVD-default: 626Mb
update fresh F10-DVD-tickAll: 1.2Gb

PREUPGRADE/LIVE YUM UPGRADE
I've already shown user needs better part of a gig just for
system updates. Size needed for preupgrade doesn't look to much bigger
than this.
Some ideas of space needed for this by running
"sudo yum --downloadonly --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide
--installroot=/tmp groupinstall foo"
Download sizes:
core: 108M
core+base: 292M
core+base+base-x: 351M
core+base+base-x+gnome-desktop: 622M
all 18 groups with default set to true (what a default DVD would do): 1.1G
all groups at once (yum groupinstall *): 3.1G

ISO SIZES
LiveCD: 700Mb
Fed 10 DVD: 3.4Gb
Blank DVD Media: 4.7Gb

Let's say we allocate 5Gb to this, which should future proof this for
quite some time.
Maybe we suggest users download *.isos to /tmp in future?

* /TMP GENERAL USE: DVD BURN/RIP/ENCODE/ETC
I assume things like nautilus-cd-creator/brasero/k3b use /tmp for making
isos?
Let's put 5Gb aside for this.

********* OTHER RELEVANT INFO ********************

Current new computer hard drive sizes.
============
As an example, I browsed Dell's cheapest desktop, netbook, laptop.
Dell Mini: 16Gb, separating '/' & '/home' probably would be overkill, 
hence the threshold.
Dell Inspiron lap: 160Gb.
Dell Inspiron desk: 250Gb,

Other OSes minimum requirements
==========
OS X: "9GB of available disk space"
Vista Home: 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space.
Vista Premium, etc: 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
XP: 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space*
Windows 7: 16 GB of available disk space (from beta notes).

Hard drive requirements from F10 release notes:
===============================================
"2.4.2.1.2. Hard disk space

All of the packages from a DVD install can occupy over 9 GB of disk
space. The final install size is determined by the installing spin and
the packages selected during installation. Additional disk space is
required during installation to support the installation environment.
The additional disk space corresponds to the size of
/Fedora/base/stage2.img plus the size of the files in /var/lib/rpm on
the installed system.

In practical terms the additional space requirements may range from as
little as 90 MiB for a minimal installation to as much as an additional
175 MiB for a larger installation.

Additional space is also required for any user data and at least 5% free
space should be maintained for proper system operation."

Thanks,

Lexual ;)