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This is the FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor.
NOTE: If you're entering this editor from the update procedure then
you probably shouldn't (C)reate anything at all but rather use only
the (M)ount command to check and mount existing partitions for
upgrading.
If you would like the label editor to do most of the following for
you, simply type `A' for automatic partitioning of the disk.
If you wish to create partitions manually you may do so by moving the
highlighted selection bar with the arrow keys over the FreeBSD
partition(s) displayed at the top of the screen. Typing (C)reate
while a partition with available free space is selected will allow you
to create a BSD partition inside of it using some or all of its
available space.
Typing (M)ount over an existing partition entry (displayed in the
middle of the screen) will allow you to set a mount point for it
without initializing it. If you want it initialized, use the (T)oggle
command to flip the Newfs flag. When Newfs is set to "Y", the
filesystem in question will be ERASED and rebuilt from scratch!
You should use this editor to create at least the following
filesystems:
Name Purpose Min Size? Optional?
---- ------- --------- ---------
/ Root filesystem 20MB No
swap Swap space 2 * MEM No
/usr System & user files 80MB or more Yes
Note: If you do not create a /usr filesystem then your / filesystem
will need to be bigger - at least 100MB. This is not recommended as
any media errors that may occur during disk I/O to user files will
corrupt the filesystem containing vital system files as well. It is
for this reason that / is generally kept on its own filesystem, where
it should be considered essentially "read only" in your administration
of it.
Swap space is a little tricker, and the rule of "2 * MEM" is simply a
best-guess approximation and not necessarily accurate for your
intended usage of the system. If you intend to use the system heavily
in a server or multi-user application, you may be well advised to
increase this size. You may also create swap space on multiple drives
for a larger "total" swap and this is, in fact, recommended if you
have multiple, fast drives for which such load-balancing can only help
overall I/O performance.
The /usr filesystem should be sized according to what kind of
distributions you're trying to load and how many packages you intend
to install in locations like /usr/local. You can also make /usr/local
a separate filesystem if you don't want to risk filling up your /usr
by mistake.
Another useful filesystem to create is /var, which contains mail, news
printer spool files and other temporary items. It is a popular
candidate for a separate paritition and should be sized according to
your estimates of the amount of mail, news or spooled print jobs that
may be stored there.
WARNING: If you do not create a separate filesystem for /var, space
for such files will be allocated out of the root (/) filesystem
instead. You may therefore wish to make the / partition bigger if you
expect a lot of mail or news and do not want to make /var its own
partition.
If you're new to this installation, you might also want to read the
following explanation of how FreeBSD's new "slice" paradigm for
looking at disk storage works:
In FreeBSD's new system, a device name can be broken up into up to 3
parts. Take a typical name like ``/dev/sd0s1a'':
The first three characters represent the drive name. If we had
a system with two SCSI drives on it then we'd see /dev/sd0 and
/dev/sd1 as the device entries representing the entire drives.
Next you have the "slice" (or "FDISK Partition") number,
as seen in the Partition Editor. Assuming that our sd0
contained two slices, a FreeBSD slice and a DOS slice, that
would give us /dev/sd0s1 and /dev/sd0s2 as device entries pointing
to the entire slices.
Next, if a slice is a FreeBSD slice, you can have a number of
(confusingly named) "partitions" inside of it.
These partitions are where various filesystems or swap areas live,
and using our hypothetical two-SCSI-disk machine again, we might
have something like the following layout on sd0:
Name Mountpoint
---- ----------
sd0s1a /
sd0s1b <swap space>
sd0s1e /usr
Because of historical convention, there is also a short-cut,
or "compatibility slice", that is maintained for easy access
to the *first* FreeBSD slice on a disk. This gives some
backwards compatibility to utilities that still may not know
how to deal with the new slice scheme.
The compatibility slice names for our filesystem above would
also look like:
Name Mountpoint
---- ----------
sd0a /
sd0b <swap space>
sd0e /usr
Again, let it be noted: FreeBSD automatically maps the
compatibility slice to the first FreeBSD slice it finds
(in this case, sd0s1). You may have multiple FreeBSD slices on a
drive, but only the first one will be mapped to the compatibility
slice!
The compatibility slice will eventually be phased out, but
it is still important right now for several reasons:
1. Some programs, as mentioned before, still don't work
with the slice paradigm and need time to catch up.
2. The FreeBSD boot blocks are unable to look for
a root file system in anything but a compatibility
slice right now. This means that our root will always
show up on "sd0a" in the above scenario, even though
it really lives over on sd0s1a and would otherwise be
referred to by its full slice name.
Once you understand all this, then the purpose of the label editor
becomes fairly clear: You're carving up the FreeBSD slices displayed
at the top of the screen into smaller pieces, which are displayed in
the middle of the screen, and then assigning FreeBSD file system names
(mount points) to them.
You can also use the label editor to mount existing partitions/slices
into your filesystem hierarchy, as is frequently done for DOS FAT
slices. For FreeBSD partitions, you can also toggle the "newfs" state
so that the partitions are either (re)created from scratch or simply
checked and mounted (the contents are preserved).
When you're done, type `Q' to exit.
No actual changes will be made to the disk until you (C)ommit from the
Install menu or (W)rite directly from this one. You're working with
what is essentially a copy of the disk label(s), both here and in the
FDISK Partition Editor, and the actual on-disk labels won't be
affected by any changes you make until you explicitly say so.
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