this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
91 points (87.0% liked)
Linux
45778 readers
1226 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think it would save you someday, when there is nothing writing in /usr so the writing in /home would not cause much damage. On a system with a huge root partition, an incomplete writing might damage the whole filesystem.
Fsck would be faster. newfs (mkfs) would be faster. I found NetBSD spend so much time when it do newfs a 32G root partition (installing NetBSD in hyper-v).
Also for the /tmp partition, we can use memory filesystem (tmpfs) if we have 4G of RAM or more, instead of physical disk to store things that are cleaned on reboot.
I'm not saying it can't happen, but I've been using Linux since the late 90s and have never had a problem with an incomplete write damaging the file system, or really anything else (except for a recent incident when a new motherboard decided to overwrite the partition tables on my RAID5 array, but that's a different story). And I have UPSs on the server and desktop, and of course the laptop has a battery in it, so the risk of sudden power loss is extremely low.
The /tmp thing in RAM is interesting. I was reconfiguring my server's drive the other day, because I didn't originally allocate enough space to /var - it worked fine for years until I started playing with plex, jellyfin, and Home Assistant (the latter due to the database size). I was shocked to find /tmp only had a few files in it, after running for years. I think I switched the server to Debian in 2018 or 2019, but that's just a guess based on the file dates I'm seeing. Maybe Debian cleans the /tmp partition regularly.