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4.a. Introduction to Block Devices We'll start by taking a good look at disk-oriented aspects of Gentoo Linux and Linux in general, including Linux filesystems, partitions and block devices. Then, once you're familiar with the ins and outs of disks and filesystems, you'll be guided through the process of setting up partitions and filesystems for your Gentoo Linux installation. To begin, we'll introduce block devices. The most common block device is the one that represents the first IDE drive in a Linux system, namely /dev/hda. If you are installing onto SCSI, FireWire, USB or SATA drives, then your first hard drive would be /dev/sda. Additional drives are enumerated by the next letter in the alphabet. As an example, the third IDE disk could be found at /dev/hdc. The block devices above represent an abstract interface to the disk. User programs can use these block devices to interact with the disk without worrying about whether the drives are IDE, SCSI or something else. The program can simply address the storage on the disk as a bunch of contiguous, randomly-accessible 512-byte blocks. Although it is theoretically possible to use a full disk to house your Linux system, this is almost never done in practice. Instead, full disk block devices are split up in smaller, more manageable block devices. On most systems, these are called partitions. 4.b. Designing a Partitioning Scheme If you are not interested in drawing up a partitioning scheme for your system, you can use the partitioning scheme we use throughout this book. Choose the filesystem layout that best matches the type of PowerPC system you are installing on. Apple New World machines are fairly straightforward to configure. The first partition is always an Apple Partition Map. This partition keeps track of the layout of the disk. You cannot remove this partition. The next partition should always be a bootstrap partition. This partition contains a small (800k) HFS filesystem that holds a copy of the bootloader Yaboot and its configuration file. This partition is not the same as a /boot partition as found on other architectures. After the boot partition, the usual Linux filesystems are placed, according to the scheme below. The swap partition is a temporary storage place for when your system runs out of physical memory. The root partition will contain the filesystem that Gentoo is installed on. If you wish to dual boot, the OSX partition can go anywhere after the bootstrap partition to insure that yaboot starts first.
Apple Old World machines are a bit more complicated to configure. The first partition is always an Apple Partition Map. This partition keeps track of the layout of the disk. You cannot remove this partition. If you are using BootX, the configuration below assumes that MacOS is installed on a seperate disk. If this is not the case, there will be additional partitions for "Apple Disk Drivers" such as Apple_Driver63, Apple_Driver_ATA, Apple_FWDriver, Apple_Driver_IOKit, Apple_Patches and the MacOS install. If you are using Quik, you will need to create a boot partition to hold the kernel, unlike other Apple boot methods. After the boot partition, the usual Linux filesystems are placed, according to the scheme below. The swap partition is a temporary storage place for when your system runs out of physical memory. The root partition will contain the filesystem that Gentoo is installed on.
The Pegasos partition layout is quite simple compared to the Apple layouts. The first partition is a Boot Partition, which contains kernels to be booted, along with an Open Firmware script that presents a menu on boot. After the boot partition, the usual Linux filesystems are placed, according to the scheme below. The swap partition is a temporary storage place for when your system runs out of physical memory. The root partition will contain the filesystem that Gentoo is installed on.
The IBM PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP) requires a small PReP boot partition on the disk's first partition, followed by the swap and root partitions.
If you are interested in knowing how big a partition should be, or even how many partitions you need, read on. Otherwise continue now with Default: Using mac-fdisk (Apple) to Partition your Disk or Alternative: Using parted (IBM/Pegasos) to Partition your Disk. The number of partitions is highly dependent on your environment. For instance, if you have lots of users, you will most likely want to have your /home separate as it increases security and makes backups easier. If you are installing Gentoo to perform as a mailserver, your /var should be separate as all received mail is stored in /var. A good choice of filesystem will then maximise your performance. Game servers should have a separate /opt as most game servers are installed there. The reason is similar for /home: security and backups. Whatever layout you chose, you will definitely want to keep /usr large: not only will it contain the majority of applications, the Portage tree alone takes more than 500Mb excluding the various sources that are stored in it. As you can see, it very much depends on what you want to achieve. Separate partitions or volumes have the following advantages:
However, multiple partitions have one big disadvantage: if not configured properly, you might result in having a system with lots of free space on one partition and none on another. There is also a 15-partition limit for SCSI and SATA. 4.c. Default: Using mac-fdisk (Apple) Partition your Disk At this point, create your partitions using mac-fdisk:
If you used Apple's Disk Utility to leave space for Linux, first delete the partitions you have created previously to make room for your new install. Use d in mac-fdisk to delete those partition(s). It will ask for the partition number to delete. Usually the first partition on NewWorld machines (Apple_partition_map) could not be deleted. If you would like to start with a clean disk, you can simply initialize the disk by pressing i. This will completely erase the disk, so use this with caution. Second, create an Apple_Bootstrap partition by using b. It will ask for what block you want to start. Enter the number of your first free partition, followed by a p. For instance this is 2p.
Now create a swap partition by pressing c. Again mac-fdisk will ask for what block you want to start this partition from. As we used 2 before to create the Apple_Bootstrap partition, you now have to enter 3p. When you're asked for the size, enter 512M (or whatever size you want -- a minimum of 512MB is recommended, but 2 times your physical memory is the generally accepted size). When asked for a name, enter swap. To create the root partition, enter c, followed by 4p to select from what block the root partition should start. When asked for the size, enter 4p again. mac-fdisk will interpret this as "Use all available space". When asked for the name, enter root. To finish up, write the partition to the disk using w and q to quit mac-fdisk.
Now that your partitions are created, you can continue with Creating Filesystems. 4.d. Using parted to Partition your Disk (Pegasos and RS/6000) parted, the Partition Editor, can now handle HFS+ partitions used by Mac OS and Mac OS X. With this tool you can resize your Mac-partitions and create space for your Linux partitions. Nevertheless, the example below describes partitioning for Pegasos machines only. To begin let's fire up parted:
If the drive is unpartitioned, run mklabel amiga to create a new disklabel for the drive. You can type print at any time in parted to display the current partition table. If at any time you change your mind or made a mistake you can press Ctrl-c to abort parted. If you intend to also install MorphOS on your Pegasos create an affs1 filesystem at the start of the drive. 32MB should be more than enough to store the MorphOS kernel. If you have a Pegasos I or intend to use any filesystem besides ext2 or ext3, you will also have to store your Linux kernel on this partition (the Pegasos II can only boot from ext2/ext3 or affs1 partitions). To create the partition run mkpart primary affs1 START END where START and END should be replaced with the megabyte range (e.g. 0 32) which creates a 32 MB partition starting at 0MB and ending at 32MB. If you chose to create an ext2 or ext3 partition instead, substitute ext2 or ext3 for affs1 in the mkpart command. You will need to create two partitions for Linux, one root filesystem and one swap partition. Run mkpart primary START END to create each partition, replacing START and END with the desired megabyte boundries. It is generally recommended that you create a swap partition that is two times bigger than the amount of RAM in your computer, but at least 512Mb is recommended. To create the swap partition, run mkpart primary linux-swap START END with START and END again denoting the partition boundries. When you are done in parted simply type quit. Now that your partitions are created, it is time to place a filesystem on them. If you're not sure which filesystems to choose and are happy with our defaults, continue with Applying a Filesystem to a Partition. Otherwise, read on to learn about the available filesystems. Several filesystems are available for use on the PowerPC architecture including ext2, ext3, ReiserFS and XFS, each with their strengths and faults. ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of journaled filesystems that can be checked for consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their non-journaled counterparts. ext3 is the journaled version of the ext2 filesystem, providing metadata journaling for fast recovery in addition to other enhanced journaling modes like full data and ordered data journaling. It uses an HTree index that enables high performance in almost all situations. In short, ext3 is a very good and reliable filesystem. ReiserFS is a B+tree-based filesystem that has very good overall performance and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x. ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. ReiserFS is solid and usable as both general-purpose filesystem and for extreme cases such as the creation of large filesystems, very large files and directories containing tens of thousands of small files. XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling which comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and an uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly. mkswap is the command that is used to initialize swap partitions:
To activate the swap partition, use swapon:
Create and activate the swap now before creating other filesystems. Applying a Filesystem to a Partition To create a filesystem on a partition or volume, there are tools available for each possible filesystem:
For instance, to make an ext3 filesystem on the root partition (/dev/hda4 in our example), you would use:
Now create the filesystems on your newly created partitions (or logical volumes).
Now that your partitions are initialized and are housing a filesystem, it is time to mount those partitions. Use the mount command. As an example we mount the root partition:
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