Resizing and defragmenting Linux filesystems (NewsForge)

Resizing and defragmenting Linux filesystems (NewsForge)

Posted Oct 14, 2003 9:40 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Resizing and defragmenting Linux filesystems (NewsForge) by beejaybee
Parent article: Resizing and defragmenting Linux filesystems (NewsForge)

I suspect you missed the context. We were talking about personal desktops and laptops, not servers. In the last case multiple file systems and building alternate roots etc. may make sense.

Linux actually does not lose the entire file system that easily in a crash, even with old ext2, and with modern journaling FS it is even less likely. Your reference to software reliability is really about the reliability of the kernel and system utilities, and Linux is not that unstable :-), unless you do development on these things or want to run bleeding-edge versions (for those users that do, I agree multiple file systems do make sense).

The security benefits you mention largely apply to servers. Having one partition is not comparable to doing everything as root, because the system is still protected by normal file permissions. And by-partition protection is too coarse anyway. What would be an improvement is importing the BSD idea of file flags and securelevels (there a file can be marked unmodifiable by anyone (even root), except in the lowest securelevel, and the securelevel can be lowered only by rebooting).

(Funny thing is, I have had these same discussions about the inconveniences of multiple partition even back in my MS-DOS days. Even there I preferred to not split disks so much, and others objected with much the same arguments as you...)

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