Partitioning The most difficult part of installing OpenBSD
Standalone OpenBSD Partitioning If you’re installing a dedicated OpenBSD machine, you don’t have to worry about sharing the hard drive with another operating system. This simplifies the partitioning process you only have to worry about OpenBSD’s requirements. The main partitions you’ll need to consider are / (root), swap space, /tmp, /var, /usr, and /home. If you forget to create any of these partitions, the installer will put the files that should go in the partitions into your root partition. This will quickly fill up your root partition! Root The root partition holds the main system configuration files and the most essential UNIX utilities needed to get a computer into single-user mode. Your system should have fast access to its root file system, so put it first on the disk. Because it holds only these basic utilities and configuration files it doesn’t need to be large; on a modern hard drive, I find a 500MB root partition comfortably roomy. I would recommend no smaller than 50MB for a root partition. (You could scrape by with a few megabytes smaller; the exact minimum size varies with the version of OpenBSD.) If you’re familiar with other some other UNIX-like operating systems, such as some distributions of Linux, you might be used to simply using a single large root partition and putting everything on it. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. With a partition safely constraining your log files, a process or user gone amok cannot fill your entire drive; while it could fill a partition, you would still be able to create and edit files on other partitions, giving you the flexibility you need to address the actual problem. Also, with a single partition, you cannot control where files are put on the disk. This hurts performance. Damage to the disk is probably spread across many different files in unrelated parts of the system, which means that your chances of recovering from a damaged disk or file system problems drop dramatically. Root Limitations Over the years, i386 systems have been expanded time and time again to surpass their own limits. They’re based upon an architecture that could originally handle a maximum of 640KB of RAM, after all! The OpenBSD kernel indeed, all modern operating system kernels work around these limits in a manner mostly transparent to the user, but when the system is first booting you’re trapped with the BIOS limitations. Many old i386 systems have a 504MB limit on hard drives, on which the BIOS cannot get at anything beyond the first 504MB of data on a disk. If your BIOS cannot find your operating system kernel in that first 504MB, it cannot boot the system. Check your hardware manual; if it makes any references to a 504MB limit, this affects you. You absolutely must place your entire root partition within the first 504MB of disk. Additionally, for some time i386 systems had a similar (not identical) 8GB limit. OpenBSD still obeys that 8GB limit. Even if your system is not susceptible to the 504MB limit, your entire root partition must be completely contained within the first 8GB of disk. Of course, if you follow my advice and make your root partition 500MB you will never have to worry about either of these restrictions and the potential damage that they can inflict. If you break these rules, your system will probably appear to work. The second you upgrade your system, or move the file /bsd, the computer will quite probably refuse to boot. Save yourself much pain; make the root partition 500MB, and the first partition on the disk, and this problem will never affect you. Swap Space The next partition on your drive should be swap space, the disk space used by virtual memory. When your computer fills its physical memory, it will start to move information that has been sitting idle in memory into swap. If things go well, your system will almost never need swap space, but if you do need it, it needs to be fast. So, how much swap space do you need? This is a matter of long debates between sysadmins. The Page 46
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