new to FreeBSD, swap/filesystem

T

tiny

Hi,

I'm new to FreeBSD, but plan to make it the last OS my current laptop will ever see. It has an Intel 1.6ghz P4-M, 1gb DDR ram & a 32gb PATA SSD. It is a personal use machine. Which means I will be developing C programs with it and doing basic internet use, perhaps a little leisurely online movie watching too. It has a small freedos partition on it. And I will wait for FreeBSD 9.1 before installing.

I have 2 basic questions:

1.) Which file system would be recommended?
2.) What size swap partition (or slice I guess) would be recommended?

I've been trying to research this information on the forums, but am not really finding anything conclusive. I'm not going to assume *BSD would be the same for swap as a Windows or Linux machine and the FreeBSD file systems are foreign to me. So I figured I'd come outright and ask. It seems the SSD is where I'm finding inconsistencies as to which configuration is best.

Thanks
 
tiny said:
Hi,

I'm new to FreeBSD, but plan to make it the last OS my current laptop will ever see. It has an Intel 1.6ghz P4-M, 1gb DDR ram & a 32gb PATA SSD. It is a personal use machine. Which means I will be developing C programs with it and doing basic internet use, perhaps a little leisurely online movie watching too. It has a small freedos partition on it. And I will wait for FreeBSD 9.1 before installing.

I have 2 basic questions:

1.) Which file system would be recommended?
Click to expand...

UFS. There is not enough memory to use ZFS, or disk space to need it.

2.) What size swap partition (or slice I guess) would be recommended?
Click to expand...

With that little memory, swap becomes more important. At least 2G, 4G would be better. Make the rest one filesystem for everything to use space most efficiently.
 
If its just an old laptop that you are going to use for development and internet use and you are waiting for 9.1, just go with PC-BSD. Its a great FreeBSD Desktop OS. Unless you are wanting to build your own FreeBSD desktop.

with your old laptop, just stick with UFS and 1GB swap slice.or more, think you'll be fine with 1G but go 1.5 or 2.
 
Thanks. I kind of figured UFS was the way to go, a few threads I've read had me thinking maybe ZFS was better for SSD's so I needed to ask.

With linux, 1gb swap has been more than adequate. But if FreeBSD is likely to perform better and be more stable with 2-4gb then that's what I'll do.

I originally considered PC-BSD as they've done some real nice work. I also considered NetBSD and was actually gonna go with OpenBSD. After looking at how the projects are managed, I feel most comfortable with FreeBSD & PC-BSD is a close 2nd.
 
To clarify on swap: generally, not much is needed. But if you build large ports like LibreOffice, that is when too little swap will bite.
 
The tunefs man page was very helpful. I'm not involved in any large ports at the moment, but if/when I do I've got other pc's that I'd use. It looks like a 2gb swap should fit my needs about right. Again, thanks for all the help. Perhaps after I get some time under my belt I'll be able to contribute to this community in some fashion or another.
 
Ok, I've been doing lots of reading. I found the article @ http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/solid-state/ and am wondering if it or how much of it applies to my situation. It does talk of using no swap space, much smaller drive space than I am using and embedded systems, so I'm not sure it is what I need to use. I wonder if it might be outdated with the introduction of trim or if somehow the two need to be combined.

I'd like to get some more experience and knowledgeable input. Here are some of my thoughts:
  • Setting up the memory file systems in the kernel might be of benefit.
  • Perhaps the read-only file system is not needed.
  • Installing directly from cd should be ok instead of an embedded type install.
  • The use of no swap space vs using at least 2gb as I would on a comparable hdd has me scratching my head.
  • Would noatime be a reasonable flag to use?

Oh yea, I should mention I've decided not to use a dual boot with freedos system. Instead, I will use a dos emulator. I've had difficulty with sound on the emulators but will save that for another thread and do a FreeBSD only setup for simplicity.
 
That article is aimed at embedded devices, where everything unnecessary is stripped from the kernel and OS. It's not the kind of thing that's done for general-purpose systems.
 
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