4. File System Structure

Linux has been multi tasking from the very beginning where a number of programs interact and run continuously. It is therefore important to keep a file structure that everyone can agree on so that the system finds data where it expects to. Historically there has been so many different standards that it was confusing and compatibility was maintained using symbolic links which confused the issue even further and the structure ended looking like a maze.

In the case of Linux a standard was fortunately agreed on early on called the File Systems Standard (FSSTND) which today is used by all main Linux distributions.

Later it was decided to make a successor that should also support operating systems other than just Linux, called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) at version 2.2 currently. This standard is under continuous development and will soon be adopted by Linux distributions.

I recommend not trying to roll your own structure as a lot of thought has gone into the standards and many software packages comply with the standards. Instead you can read more about this at the FHS home page.

This HOWTO endeavours to comply with FSSTND and will follow FHS when distributions become available.

4.1 File System Features

The various parts of FSSTND have different requirements regarding speed, reliability and size, for instance losing root is a pain but can easily be recovered. Losing /var/spool/mail is a rather different issue. Here is a quick summary of some essential parts and their properties and requirements. Note that this is just a guide, there can be binaries in etc and lib directories, libraries in bin directories and so on.

Swap

Speed

Maximum! Though if you rely too much on swap you should consider buying some more RAM. Note, however, that on many old Pentium PC motherboards the cache will not work on RAM above 128 MB.

Size

Similar as for RAM. Quick and dirty algorithm: just as for tea: 16 MB for the machine and 2 MB for each user. Smallest kernel run in 1 MB but is tight, use 4 MB for general work and light applications, 8 MB for X11 or GCC or 16 MB to be comfortable. (The author is known to brew a rather powerful cuppa tea...)

Some suggest that swap space should be 1-2 times the size of the RAM, pointing out that the locality of the programs determines how effective your added swap space is. Note that using the same algorithm as for 4BSD is slightly incorrect as Linux does not allocate space for pages in core.

A more thorough approach is to consider swap space plus RAM as your total working set, so if you know how much space you will need at most, you subtract the physical RAM you have and that is the swap space you will need.

There is also another reason to be generous when dimensioning your swap space: memory leaks. Ill behaving programs that do not free the memory they allocate for themselves are said to have a memory leak. This allocation remains even after the offending program has stopped so this is a source of memory consumption. Only after the program dies is the memory returned. Once all physical RAM and swap space are exhausted the only solution is to kill the offending processes if possible, or failing that, reboot and start over. Thankfully such programs are not too common but should you come across one you will find that extra swap space will buy you extra time between reboots.

Also remember to take into account the type of programs you use. Some programs that have large working sets, such as image processing software have huge data structures loaded in RAM rather than working explicitly on disk files. Data and computing intensive programs like this will cause excessive swapping if you have less RAM than the requirements.

Other types of programs can lock their pages into RAM. This can be for security reasons, preventing copies of data reaching a swap device or for performance reasons such as in a real time module. Either way, locking pages reduces the remaining amount of swappable memory and can cause the system to swap earlier then otherwise expected.

In man 8 mkswap it is explained that each swap partition can be a maximum of just under 128 MB in size for 32-bit machines and just under 256 MB for 64-bit machines.

This however changed with kernel 2.2.0 after which the limit is 2 GB. The man page has been updated to reflect this change.

Reliability

Medium. When it fails you know it pretty quickly and failure will cost you some lost work. You save often, don't you?

Note 1

Linux offers the possibility of interleaved swapping across multiple devices, a feature that can gain you much. Check out "man 8 swapon" for more details. However, software raiding swap across multiple devices adds more overheads than you gain.

Thus the /etc/fstab file might look like this:

/dev/sda1       swap            swap    pri=1           0       0
/dev/sdc1       swap            swap    pri=1           0       0

Remember that the fstab file is very sensitive to the formatting used, read the man page carefully and do not just cut and paste the lines above.

Note 2

Some people use a RAM disk for swapping or some other file systems. However, unless you have some very unusual requirements or setups you are unlikely to gain much from this as this cuts into the memory available for caching and buffering.

Note 2b

There is once exception: on a number of badly designed motherboards the on board cache memory is not able to cache all the RAM that can be addressed. Many older motherboards could accept 128 MB RAM but only cache the lower 64 MB. In such cases it would improve the performance if you used the upper (uncached) 64 MB RAM for RAMdisk based swap or other temporary storage.

Temporary Storage (/tmp and /var/tmp)

Speed

Very high. On a separate disk/partition this will reduce fragmentation generally, though ext2fs handles fragmentation rather well.

Size

Hard to tell, small systems are easy to run with just a few MB but these are notorious hiding places for stashing files away from prying eyes and quota enforcement and can grow without control on larger machines. Suggested: small home machine: 8 MB, large home machine: 32 MB, small server: 128 MB, and large machines up to 500 MB (The machine used by the author at work has 1100 users and a 300 MB /tmp directory). Keep an eye on these directories, not only for hidden files but also for old files. Also be prepared that these partitions might be the first reason you might have to resize your partitions.

Reliability

Low. Often programs will warn or fail gracefully when these areas fail or are filled up. Random file errors will of course be more serious, no matter what file area this is.

Files

Mostly short files but there can be a huge number of them. Normally programs delete their old tmp files but if somehow an interruption occurs they could survive. Many distributions have a policy regarding cleaning out tmp files at boot time, you might want to check out what your setup is.

Note1

In FSSTND there is a note about putting /tmp on RAM disk. This, however, is not recommended for the same reasons as stated for swap. Also, as noted earlier, do not use flash RAM drives for these directories. One should also keep in mind that some systems are set to automatically clean tmp areas on rebooting.

Note2

Older systems had a /usr/tmp but this is no longer recommended and for historical reasons a symbolic link now makes it point to one of the other tmp areas.

(* That was 50 lines, I am home and dry! *)

Spool Areas (/var/spool/news and /var/spool/mail)

Speed

High, especially on large news servers. News transfer and expiring are disk intensive and will benefit from fast drives. Print spools: low. Consider RAID0 for news.

Size

For news/mail servers: whatever you can afford. For single user systems a few MB will be sufficient if you read continuously. Joining a list server and taking a holiday is, on the other hand, not a good idea. (Again the machine I use at work has 100 MB reserved for the entire /var/spool)

Reliability

Mail: very high, news: medium, print spool: low. If your mail is very important (isn't it always?) consider RAID for reliability.

Files

Usually a huge number of files that are around a few KB in size. Files in the print spool can on the other hand be few but quite sizable.

Note

Some of the news documentation suggests putting all the .overview files on a drive separate from the news files, check out all news FAQs for more information. Typical size is about 3-10 percent of total news spool size.

Home Directories (/home)

Speed

Medium. Although many programs use /tmp for temporary storage, others such as some news readers frequently update files in the home directory which can be noticeable on large multiuser systems. For small systems this is not a critical issue.

Size

Tricky! On some systems people pay for storage so this is usually then a question of finance. Large systems such as Nyx.net (which is a free Internet service with mail, news and WWW services) run successfully with a suggested limit of 100 KB per user and 300 KB as enforced maximum. Commercial ISPs offer typically about 5 MB in their standard subscription packages.

If however you are writing books or are doing design work the requirements balloon quickly.

Reliability

Variable. Losing /home on a single user machine is annoying but when 2000 users call you to tell you their home directories are gone it is more than just annoying. For some their livelihood relies on what is here. You do regular backups of course?

Files

Equally tricky. The minimum setup for a single user tends to be a dozen files, 0.5 - 5 KB in size. Project related files can be huge though.

Note1

You might consider RAID for either speed or reliability. If you want extremely high speed and reliability you might be looking at other operating system and hardware platforms anyway. (Fault tolerance etc.)

Note2

Web browsers often use a local cache to speed up browsing and this cache can take up a substantial amount of space and cause much disk activity. There are many ways of avoiding this kind of performance hits, for more information see the sections on Home Directories and WWW.

Note3

Users often tend to use up all available space on the /home partition. The Linux Quota subsystem is capable of limiting the number of blocks and the number of inode a single user ID can allocate on a per-filesystem basis. See the Linux Quota mini-HOWTO by Albert M.C. Tam bertie (at) scn.org for details on setup.

Main Binaries ( /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin)

Speed

Low. Often data is bigger than the programs which are demand loaded anyway so this is not speed critical. Witness the successes of live file systems on CD ROM.

Size

The sky is the limit but 200 MB should give you most of what you want for a comprehensive system. A big system, for software development or a multi purpose server should perhaps reserve 500 MB both for installation and for growth.

Reliability

Low. This is usually mounted under root where all the essentials are collected. Nevertheless losing all the binaries is a pain...

Files

Variable but usually of the order of 10 - 100 KB.

Libraries ( /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib)

Speed

Medium. These are large chunks of data loaded often, ranging from object files to fonts, all susceptible to bloating. Often these are also loaded in their entirety and speed is of some use here.

Size

Variable. This is for instance where word processors store their immense font files. The few that have given me feedback on this report about 70 MB in their various lib directories. A rather complete Debian 1.2 installation can take as much as 250 MB which can be taken as an realistic upper limit. The following ones are some of the largest disk space consumers: GCC, Emacs, TeX/LaTeX, X11 and perl.

Reliability

Low. See point Main binaries.

Files

Usually large with many of the order of 1 MB in size.

Note

For historical reasons some programs keep executables in the lib areas. One example is GCC which have some huge binaries in the /usr/lib/gcc/lib hierarchy.

Boot

Speed

Quite low: after all booting doesn't happen that often and loading the kernel is just a tiny fraction of the time it takes to get the system up and running.

Size

Quite small, a complete image with some extras fit on a single floppy so 5 MB should be plenty.

Reliability

High. See section below on Root.

Note 1

The most important part about the Boot partition is that on many systems it must reside below cylinder 1023. This is a BIOS limitation that Linux cannot get around.

Note 1a

The above is not necessarily true for recent IDE systems and not for any SCSI disks. For more information check the latest Large Disk HOWTO.

Note 2

Recently a new boot loader has been written that overcomes the 1023 sector limit. For more information check out this article on nuni.

Root

Speed

Quite low: only the bare minimum is here, much of which is only run at startup time.

Size

Relatively small. However it is a good idea to keep some essential rescue files and utilities on the root partition and some keep several kernel versions. Feedback suggests about 20 MB would be sufficient.

Reliability

High. A failure here will possibly cause a fair bit of grief and you might end up spending some time rescuing your boot partition. With some practice you can of course do this in an hour or so, but I would think if you have some practice doing this you are also doing something wrong.

Naturally you do have a rescue disk? Of course this is updated since you did your initial installation? There are many ready made rescue disks as well as rescue disk creation tools you might find valuable. Presumably investing some time in this saves you from becoming a root rescue expert.

Note 1

If you have plenty of drives you might consider putting a spare emergency boot partition on a separate physical drive. It will cost you a little bit of space but if your setup is huge the time saved, should something fail, will be well worth the extra space.

Note 2

For simplicity and also in case of emergencies it is not advisable to put the root partition on a RAID level 0 system. Also if you use RAID for your boot partition you have to remember to have the md option turned on for your emergency kernel.

Note 3

For simplicity it is quite common to keep Boot and Root on the same partition. If you do that, then in order to boot from LILO it is important that the essential boot files reside wholly within cylinder 1023. This includes the kernel as well as files found in /boot.

DOS etc.

At the danger of sounding heretical I have included this little section about something many reading this document have strong feelings about. Unfortunately many hardware items come with setup and maintenance tools based around those systems, so here goes.

Speed

Very low. The systems in question are not famed for speed so there is little point in using prime quality drives. Multitasking or multi-threading are not available so the command queueing facility found in SCSI drives will not be taken advantage of. If you have an old IDE drive it should be good enough. The exception is to some degree Win95 and more notably NT which have multi-threading support which should theoretically be able to take advantage of the more advanced features offered by SCSI devices.

Size

The company behind these operating systems is not famed for writing tight code so you have to be prepared to spend a few tens of MB depending on what version you install of the OS or Windows. With an old version of DOS or Windows you might fit it all in on 50 MB.

Reliability

Ha-ha. As the chain is no stronger than the weakest link you can use any old drive. Since the OS is more likely to scramble itself than the drive is likely to self destruct you will soon learn the importance of keeping backups here.

Put another way: "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep this partition working. The warranty will self destruct in 10 seconds..."

Recently I was asked to justify my claims here. First of all I am not calling DOS and Windows sorry excuses for operating systems. Secondly there are various legal issues to be taken into account. Saying there is a connection between the last two sentences are merely the ravings of the paranoid. Surely. Instead I shall offer the esteemed reader a few key words: DOS 4.0, DOS 6.x and various drive compression tools that shall remain nameless.

4.2 Explanation of Terms

Naturally the faster the better but often the happy installer of Linux has several disks of varying speed and reliability so even though this document describes performance as 'fast' and 'slow' it is just a rough guide since no finer granularity is feasible. Even so there are a few details that should be kept in mind:

Speed

This is really a rather woolly mix of several terms: CPU load, transfer setup overhead, disk seek time and transfer rate. It is in the very nature of tuning that there is no fixed optimum, and in most cases price is the dictating factor. CPU load is only significant for IDE systems where the CPU does the transfer itself but is generally low for SCSI, see SCSI documentation for actual numbers. Disk seek time is also small, usually in the millisecond range. This however is not a problem if you use command queueing on SCSI where you then overlap commands keeping the bus busy all the time. News spools are a special case consisting of a huge number of normally small files so in this case seek time can become more significant.

There are two main parameters that are of interest here:

Seek

is usually specified in the average time take for the read/write head to seek from one track to another. This parameter is important when dealing with a large number of small files such as found in spool files. There is also the extra seek delay before the desired sector rotates into position under the head. This delay is dependent on the angular velocity of the drive which is why this parameter quite often is quoted for a drive. Common values are 4500, 5400 and 7200 RPM (rotations per minute). Higher RPM reduces the seek time but at a substantial cost. Also drives working at 7200 RPM have been known to be noisy and to generate a lot of heat, a factor that should be kept in mind if you are building a large array or "disk farm". Very recently drives working at 10000 RPM has entered the market and here the cooling requirements are even stricter and minimum figures for air flow are given.

Transfer

is usually specified in megabytes per second. This parameter is important when handling large files that have to be transferred. Library files, dictionaries and image files are examples of this. Drives featuring a high rotation speed also normally have fast transfers as transfer speed is proportional to angular velocity for the same sector density.

It is therefore important to read the specifications for the drives very carefully, and note that the maximum transfer speed quite often is quoted for transfers out of the on board cache (burst speed) and not directly from the platter (sustained speed). See also section on Power and Heating.

Reliability

Naturally no-one would want low reliability disks but one might be better off regarding old disks as unreliable. Also for RAID purposes (See the relevant information) it is suggested to use a mixed set of disks so that simultaneous disk crashes become less likely.

So far I have had only one report of total file system failure but here unstable hardware seemed to be the cause of the problems.

Disks are cheap these days yet people still underestimate the value of the contents of the drives. If you need higher reliability make sure you replace old drives and keep spares. It is not unusual that drives can work more or less continuous for years and years but what often kills a drive in the end is power cycling.

Files

The average file size is important in order to decide the most suitable drive parameters. A large number of small files makes the average seek time important whereas for big files the transfer speed is more important. The command queueing in SCSI devices is very handy for handling large numbers of small files, but for transfer EIDE is not too far behind SCSI and normally much cheaper than SCSI.

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