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As a general rule, what is the best partition setup for a linux installation?

I currently use three different ones, one as a swap space, one dedicated to the /home folder, and another one containing everything else.

Are there better setups, with partitions for other specific linux system folders?

2 Answers 2

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For general setups, your partitioning scheme is fine. Just ensure that each partition is of adequate size. I tend to allocate twice the amount of RAM for /swap and then split the remaining hard disk space 33%/66% for / and /home.

Having a seperate (small, ~200mb) partition for /boot may be advantageous though if you are using an ext2 partitioning scheme and required if you have encrypted / partition. Generally though, putting /boot on a seperate drive is from the old days.

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  • Is there any reason everyone suggests twice as much swap space as RAM, or is it just something that's been passed down? When I have 12GB of RAM in a system, 24GB of swap seems a bit excessive, so I usually do less.
    – Suchipi
    Mar 12, 2014 at 21:51
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    Like putting /boot on a seperate partition , the 2x rule is indeed a passed down rule-of-thumb from when memory managers used to be a lot less sophisticated than they are now. Really, in modern user-OSes the need for swap space decreases as RAM increases (while the quality requirement of the swap increases). Although, with as cheap as physical platter-based storage is now days, its better to have too much swap space than to run out imho. With 12GB of RAM, 4GB is the smallest amount of swap I'd comfortably allocate.
    – 0x7a79
    Mar 12, 2014 at 21:58
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Amount of RAM in the system Recommended swap space

2GB - 2 times the amount of RAM

2GB – 8GB - Equal to the amount of RAM

8GB – 64GB - 0.5 times the amount of RAM

64GB - 4GB of swap space

Minimum partition sizes are

/       2 GB
/usr    /usr on a seperate partition is not supported.
/tmp    tmpfs by default, 50 MB otherwise.
/var    500 MB
/home   100 MB
/boot   250 MB

You can read more about partitioning at Fedora Docs.

Reference: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html

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