Too much of hard disk space (5% blocks) is reserved for big partitions (e.g. /home)
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
partman-auto (Baltix) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
partman-auto (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: partman
Currently Ubuntu and Debian installer creates one big filesystem (mounted to /) as default and reserves a lot of space (5% blocks) for root user.
5 or 10 years ago this was no so big problem, because hard disks were 1 - 20 GB size, but currently smallest hard drive in the market is about 200 GB size, so, after Ubuntu installation ordinary user "looses" 10 GB of hard disk space ! This is real problem now - who wanna "donate" 10 Gigabytes for nothing ?
So, I'm suggesting to reserve not 5%, but 1% or 2% of hard disk space for big partitions (e.g. /home) during installation. It's very easy to count how many percent should be reserved for root - syslog, apache.log and other important files, which are needed for correctly working system almost newer will need more than 300 Megabytes after filesystem is filled up, so, we could reserve 2% if hard disk partition is larger than 13 Gb (or 15 Gb) and 1 % if partition is larger than 25 Gb (or 30 Gb). If it's too hard to make such changes in parted, then at least reserve only 1% for partitions, mounted to /home folder as default.
This problem is noticed by lots of Ubuntu and other Linux users, look at http://
[..]
Ext2fs and ext3fs reserve a number of blocks for use by the superuser (or some other user you specify). The default value of 5 percent reserved space may be overkill on large partitions or on less critical partitions (such as /home). You can gain a bit more space by using the -m reserved-percentage option to mke2fs. Changing this percentage won't affect actual disk performance, but it may gain you just a bit more available disk space.
[..]
Btw, other filesystems, like xfs or reiserfs doesn't reserve any space for root user, so, it seems this is not so important feature, at least not so important for majority of situations...
Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.