FS#29160 - Installer Auto Prepare option should give more space to / partition

Attached to Project: Release Engineering
Opened by Cássio Pereira (cpereira) - Thursday, 29 March 2012, 00:44 GMT
Last edited by Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera) - Monday, 26 November 2012, 04:53 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category AIF
Status Closed
Assigned To Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be)
Architecture All
Severity High
Priority Normal
Reported Version testbuild (specify!)
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Description:

The Arch installer offers an option to "Auto-prepare" the hard drive with a default partitioning scheme, which generates a / partition with 7.5GB. While installing, I thought this was a sensible default, as most of the data resides in /home, which the installer puts in a separate partition with all the remaining disk space.

However, after a few days I noticed my / partition was full, which made some programs stop working, like dropbox.
I then proceeded to clean my pacman cache, which freed up about 1GB worth of space.

But what was really taking up space was my /usr directory, as a lot of software places data there.

The net result was that I had to reinstall everything to get a / partition of sufficient size. Simply resizing /home was not enough if I wanted to salvage my install, as I would have to also move the partition over to create adjacent space to / (very time consuming and not so safe operation according to gparted).

So, my "gripe" is that the installer "Auto-prepare" option should give / more space, such as 20GB, which is the recommended in the Beginner's Guide and a more sensible default -- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide#Partitioning_hard_disks:_General_information

More people seem to have had this problem:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=135664
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1058981

This task depends upon

Closed by  Gerardo Exequiel Pozzi (djgera)
Monday, 26 November 2012, 04:53 GMT
Reason for closing:  Deferred
Comment by Karol Błażewicz (karol) - Thursday, 29 March 2012, 01:31 GMT
Why not keep 7.5 GB the default (not everyone is using a huge disk) and use the manual partitioning to set the sizes however you want?
Comment by Cássio Pereira (cpereira) - Thursday, 29 March 2012, 02:47 GMT
Because the trouble you get if you run into space issues is a major headache.
If someone has a very small disk then he will either shrink the size or the install will just fail, allowing the user to adjust the size.

What I'm saying is that it's pretty easy to fall into the trap of thinking 7.5GB is enough for / during an install. But a nasty surprise after only a few days you get problems because it's full.

Right now, after just a few days of usage, I have on my netbook:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 7.4G 4.3G 2.7G 62% /

out of that:

[cassio@archvaio ~]$ du -hs /usr/
3.0G /usr/

I think it is much more sensible to increase the default, considering that /var and /usr are in that partition (in auto prepare).
Another option would be to put /home together in the same / partition and use all the remaining disk space after setting up /boot and swap.

Considering hard drives nowadays are usually huge, I think it's more sensible to use a larger / .

The wiki suggests 8-12GB for /var and 15-20GB for /. Considering that in the auto-prepare option both are in the same partition, the default size should be in the range 23-32GB.
Comment by Pablo Lezaeta (Jristz) - Sunday, 13 May 2012, 23:53 GMT
Actualy a Kernel build w gzip and habing grub2 and many modules and two or more Hooks added can fit complety the 32M of the default /boot
(Actualy I use 30 of 32
A proposal is augment the /boot partition by default to 48-64Mb for prevent this full /boot partition

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