[PC-BSD Dev] Subject: Re: 9.0 Recommendation: partitioning

[Roger Marquis]

> Suppose you have only a single partition / and want to mount it
> read-only...how are you going to accommodate this ?  Hm?  I'd imagine you
> have a terrific time since all inodes reference back to /.  This will
> include all sub-mount below /...

Not sure I understand the application but I would guess that less than
0.01% of PC-BSD installations would ever want to mount root read-only.
We should be looking at the other 99.99% for defaults.

> The purpose of multiple partition/mount is for flexibility.

If it is then how do you explain the statistically significant
correlation between intra-disk partitions and diskfull trouble tickets?
Partitions may work well for inter-disk partitions (inter != intra) but
if they made systems administration easier you'd think we would see them
implemented on raid-based NAS and SAN fileservers.  We don't because they
aren't.

> You are free to choose a partition scheme as you see fit.

Nobody has implied otherwise.  This true regardless of whether the
default is single or multi-partition, single or multi-disk.

> PCBSD used to have / only during install.  People complained about that too!

Got references?  So far the only use-case I've read supporting default
multi-partitioning is to accommodate a read-only root.

Roger