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In this article, learn to design a disk partitioning layout for a Linux system. Learn to:
- Allocate filesystems and swap space to separate partitions or disks
- Tailor the design to the intended use of the system
- Ensure the system can be booted
- Understand the basic features of Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
This article helps you prepare for Objective 102.1 in Topic 102 of the Linux Professional Institute's Junior Level Administration (LPIC-1) exam 101. The objective has a weight of 2.
Note: This article deals mostly with planning the layout. For the implementation steps, see the articles for Topic 104 (described in our series roadmap).
Note: This article includes material for the LPI Exam 101: Objective Changes as of July 2, 2012. We have added basic information on Logical Volume Manager. We have also added more detail on the partition table layouts used with traditional MBR disks and we have added some basic information on the GUID Partition Table (GPT). The new code listings and figures were all done on a 64-bit Fedora 16 system.
To get the most from the articles in this series, you should have a basic knowledge of Linux and a working Linux system on which you can practice the commands covered in this article. Sometimes different versions of a program will format output differently, so your results may not always look exactly like the listings and figures shown here.
A Linux filesystem contains files that are arranged on a disk or other block storage device in directories. As with many other systems, directories on a Linux system may contain other directories called subdirectories. Unlike a system such as Microsoft® Windows® with a concept of separate file systems on different drive letters (A:, C:, etc.), a Linux filesystem is a single tree with the / directory as its root directory.
You might wonder why disk layout is important if the filesystem is just one big tree. Well, what really happens is that each block device, such as a hard drive partition, CD-ROM, or floppy disk, actually has a filesystem on it. You create the single tree view of the filesystem by mounting the filesystems on different devices at a point in the tree called a mount point.
Usually, the kernel starts this mount process by mounting the filesystem on some hard drive partition as /. You may mount other hard drive partitions as /boot, /tmp, or /home. You may mount the filesystem on a floppy drive as /mnt/floppy, and the filesystem on a CD-ROM as /media/cdrom1, for example. You may also mount files from other systems using a networked filesystem such as NFS. There are other types of file mounts, but this gives you an idea of the process. While the mount process actually mounts the filesystem on some device, it is common to simply say that you "mount the device," which is understood to mean "mount the filesystem on the device."
Now, suppose you have just mounted the root file system (/) and you want to mount a CD-ROM, /dev/sr0, at the mount point /media/cdrom. The mount point must exist before you mount the CD-ROM over it. When you mount the CD-ROM, the files and subdirectories on the CD-ROM become the files and subdirectories in and below /media/cdrom. Any files or subdirectories that were already in /media/cdrom are no longer visible, although they still exist on the block device that contained the mount point /media/cdrom. If the CD-ROM is unmounted, then the original files and subdirectories become visible again. You should avoid this problem by not placing other files in a directory intended for use as a mount point.
Table 1 shows the shows the directories required in / by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (for more detail on FHS, see Resources).
Table 1. FHS directories in /
| Directory | Description |
|---|---|
| bin | Essential command binaries |
| boot | Static files of the boot loader |
| dev | Device files |
| etc | Host-specific system configuration |
| lib | Essential shared libraries and kernel modules |
| media | Mount point for removable media |
| mnt | Mount point for mounting a filesystem temporarily |
| opt | Add-on application software packages |
| sbin | Essential system binaries |
| srv | Data for services provided by this system |
| tmp | Temporary files |
| usr | Secondary hierarchy |
| var | Variable data |
The first SCSI drive is usually /dev/sda. On an older Linux system, the first IDE hard drive is /dev/hda. With the advent of serially attached (SATA) IDE drives, a mixed PATA/SATA system would sometimes use /dev/hda for the first PATA drive and /devsda for the first SATA drive. On newer systems, all IDE drives are named /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and so on. The change of name for IDE drives is a result of the hotplug system, which initially supported USB drives. Hotplug allows you to plug in new devices and use them immediately, and is now used for all devices whether they are built into the system or plugged later into a running system using USB or Firewire (IEEE 1394) or potentially other types of connection.
Traditionally, a hard drive is formatted into 512 byte sectors. All the sectors on a disk platter that can be read without moving the head constitute a track. Disks usually have more than one platter. The collection of tracks on the various platters that can be read without moving the head is called a cylinder. The geometry of a hard drive is expressed in cylinders, tracks (or heads) per cylinder, and sectors/track. At the time of this writing, drive manufacturers are starting to introduce disks with 4K sectors. If a filesystem still assumes 512-byte sectors, you may lose performance if a partition does not start at a sector that is on a 4K boundary.
Limitations on the possible sizes for cylinders, heads, and sectors used with DOS operating systems on PC systems resulted in BIOS translating geometry values so that larger hard drives could be supported. Eventually, even these methods were insufficient. More recent developments in disk drive technology have led to logical block addressing (LBA), so the CHS geometry measurements are less important, and the reported geometry on a modern disk bears little or no relation to the real physical sector layout. The larger disks in use today have forced an extension to LBA known as LBA48, which reserves up to 48 bits for sector numbers. A new format called GUID Partition Table (or GPT) is now being used for larger drives instead of the MBR format. GPT drives support up to 128 partitions by default.
The space on a hard drive is divided (or partitioned) into partitions. Partitions cannot overlap; space that is not allocated to a partition is called free space. The partitions have names like /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, /dev/sda1, and so on. IDE drives are limited to 63 partitions on systems that do not use hotplug support for IDE drives. SCSI drives, USB drives, and IDE drives supported by hotplug are limited to 15 partitions. A partition is often allocated as an integral number of cylinders (based on the possibly inaccurate notion of a cylinder).
If two different partitioning programs have different understandings of the nominal disk geometry, it is possible for one partitioning program to report an error or possible problem with partitions created by another partitioning program. You may also see this kind of problem if a disk is moved from one system to another, particularly if the BIOS capabilities are different.
You can see the nominal geometry on a Linux system using either the
parted or fdisk
tools.
Older Linux systems also reported geometry in the /proc filesystem,
in a file such as /proc/ide/hda/geometry, a file that might not be present
on newer systems.
Listing 1 shows how
to use the fdisk command to display the
partitions and geometry of an IDE hard drive with SATA attachment. The
-v parameter of
fdisk shows the version. You will need to be
root or have root authority via sudo, as shown
here, to display or manipulate the partition table.
Listing 1. Hard disk geometry
ian@attic4:~$ fdisk -v fdisk (util-linux-ng 2.16) ian@attic4:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/sdb [sudo] password for ian: The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 30401. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000404d6 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1 25 200781 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 26 12965 103940550 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 12966 30401 140054670 83 Linux Command (m for help): |
In Listing 1, note that
fdisk prints a warning about the nominal
position for the end of cylinder 1024. Cylinder 1024 is important in some
older systems where the BIOS is only able to boot partitions that are
completely located within the first 1024 cylinders of a disk. This is most
likely to occur in a BIOS that does not have LBA support, or some older
boot managers. It is not usually a problem in modern machines, although
you should be aware that the limit may exist.
You can use fdisk to display units in sectors,
using the -u option, or you can use the
u subcommand in interactive mode to toggle
between sectors and cylinders. The parted
command supports several different units. Listing 2 illustrates the use of different units in
parted for the same disk as used in Listing 1.
Listing 2. Using different units with parted
ian@attic4:~$ sudo parted /dev/sdb
[sudo] password for ian:
GNU Parted 1.8.8.1.159-1e0e
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) help u
unit UNIT set the default unit to UNIT
UNIT is one of: s, B, kB, MB, GB, TB, compact, cyl, chs, %, kiB, MiB,
GiB, TiB
(parted) p
Model: ATA HDT722525DLA380 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 206MB 206MB primary ext3
2 206MB 107GB 106GB primary ext4
3 107GB 250GB 143GB primary ext3
(parted) u s
(parted) p
Model: ATA HDT722525DLA380 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 488397168s
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 63s 401624s 401562s primary ext3
2 401625s 208282724s 207881100s primary ext4
3 208282725s 488392064s 280109340s primary ext3
(parted) u chs
(parted) p
Model: ATA HDT722525DLA380 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 30401,80,62
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 30401,255,63. Each cylinder is 8225kB.
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Type File system Flags
1 0,1,0 24,254,62 primary ext3
2 25,0,0 12964,254,62 primary ext4
3 12965,0,0 30400,254,62 primary ext3
(parted) |
Note that the apparent discrepancy between the starting cylinder and ending
cylinders shown by parted and
fdisk output is due to the fact that
parted starts counting cylinders at 0, while
fdisk starts counting them at 1. Listing 3 shows that
fdisk does have the same starting and ending
sector as parted.
Listing 3. Checking start and end sector numbers
ian@attic4:~$ sudo fdisk -ul /dev/sdb Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000404d6 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 63 401624 200781 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 401625 208282724 103940550 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 208282725 488392064 140054670 83 Linux ian@attic4:~$ echo $(( 208282725 / 255 / 63 )) 12965 |
IDE drives have three types of partition: primary, logical, and extended. The partition table is located in the master boot record (MBR) of a disk. The MBR is the first sector on the disk, so the partition table is not a very large part of it. This limits the number of primary partitions on a disk to four. When more than four partitions are required, as is often the case, one of the primary partitions must instead become an extended partition. An extended partition is a container for one or more logical partitions. In this way, you can have more than 4 partitions on a drive using the MBR layout.
The MBR layout also limits the maximum size of disk that is supported to approximately two terabytes. The newer GUID Partition Table (or GPT) layout solves this size limitation and also the rather small limitation on the number of partitions. A disk formatted using GPT layout supports up to 128 primary partitions by default and does not use extended or logical partitions. For more information on MBR internals and how the GUID Partition Table (GPT) works, see MBR, EBR, GPT and LVM internals.
An extended partition is simply a container for one, or usually more, logical partitions. This partitioning scheme was originally used with MS DOS and PC DOS and permits PC disks to be used by DOS, Windows, or Linux systems. A disk may contain only one extended partition. Data is stored in the logical partitions within the extended partition. You cannot store data in an extended partition without first creating a logical partition within it.
Linux numbers primary or extended partitions as 1 through 4, so dev/sda may have four primary partitions, /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3, and /dev/sda4. Or it may have a single primary partition /dev/sda1 and an extended partition /dev/sda2. If logical partitions are defined, they are numbered starting at 5, so the first logical partition on /dev/sda will be /dev/sda5, even if there are no primary partitions and one extended partition (/dev/sda1) on the disk. So if you want more than four partitions on an IDE drive, you will lose one partition number to the extended partition. Although the theoretical maximum number of partitions on an IDE drive is now limited to 15 for kernels with hotplug, you may or may not be able to create the last few. Be careful to check that everything can work if you plan on using more than 12 partitions on a drive.
The disk used in the earlier examples has three primary partitions, all
formatted for Linux use. Two use the ext3 filesystem, while the other one
uses ext4. Listing 4 shows the output
from the parted command
p for an internal drive with primary, extended,
and logical partitions on a Ubuntu 9.10 system and for a USB drive
attached to a Fedora 12 system. Note the different filesystem types. Note
also that you can specify one or more parted
commands on the command line to avoid interactive mode.
Listing 4. Displaying the partition table with parted
ian@attic4:~$ sudo parted /dev/sda u s p [sudo] password for ian: Model: ATA WDC WD6401AALS-0 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 1250263728s Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 63s 2040254s 2040192s primary ext3 2 2040255s 22523129s 20482875s primary linux-swap(v1) 4 22523130s 1250258624s 1227735495s extended boot 5 22523193s 167397299s 144874107s logical ext3 6 167397363s 310761359s 143363997s logical ext3 7 310761423s 455442749s 144681327s logical ext3 8 455442813s 600092009s 144649197s logical ext3 [root@echidna ~]# parted /dev/sdc p Model: WD My Book (scsi) Disk /dev/sdc: 750GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 135GB 135GB primary fat32 lba 2 135GB 750GB 616GB extended 5 135GB 292GB 157GB logical ext3 6 292GB 479GB 187GB logical ext3 7 479GB 555GB 76.5GB logical ext3 8 555GB 750GB 195GB logical ext3 |
The fdisk command does not understand GPT
formatted disks. Instead you can use either
parted, gparted, or
gdisk. See Listing 14
for an example of the output from gdisk.
Warning: If you use gdisk on a disk that uses MBR layout, then it will offer to convert the disk to GPT format for you. Be careful!
Now that you understand the various types of partitions, you might wonder what happens if you don't plan the right sizes for your various partitions. How do you expand or contract them? Or what happens if you need more space than the capacity of a single disk for a large filesystem? Enter Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
With LVM, you can abstract the management of your disk space so a single filesystem can span multiple disks or partitions and you easily can add or remove space from filesystems. The current version is lvm2 which is backwards compatible with the original lvm (sometimes now called lvm1).
LVM manages disk space using:
- Physical Volumes (PVs)
- Volume Groups (VGs)
- Logical Volumes (LVs)
A Physical Volume is either a whole drive or a partition on a drive. Although LVM can use the whole drive without having a partition defined, this is not usually a good idea as you will see in MBR, EBR, GPT and LVM internals.
A Volume Group is a collection of one or more PVs. The space in a VG is managed as if it were one large disk, even if the underlying PVs are spread across multiple partitions or multiple disks. The underlying PVs can be different sizes and on different kinds of disks as we'll illustrate shortly.
A Logical Volume is analogous to a physical GPT or MBR partition in the sense that it is the unit of space that is formatted with a particular filesystem type such as ext4 or XFS and it is then mounted as part of your Linux filesystem. An LV resides entirely within a VG.
Think of a PV as the unit of physical space that is aggregated into an abstraction called a VG which is rather like a virtual drive. The VG or virtual drive is then partitioned into LVs for use by filesystems.
Within a VG, you manage space in terms of extents. The default extent size is 4MB which is usually adequate. If you use a large extent size, be aware that all PVs in a VG must use the same extent size. When you allocate or resize an LV, the allocation unit is the extent size. So the default results in LVs that are multiples of 4MB and they must be incremented or shrunk in multiples of 4MB.
The final piece of the LVM puzzle is the device mapper. This is a piece of the Linux kernel that provides a generic foundation for virtual devices such as LVM or software RAID.
The commands for working with LVM are usually in the lvm2 package.
You can run a number of commands from the command line, or you
can run the lvm command which provides a shell
for running the various LVM commands. Listing 5 shows the
lvm command and the various commands that can
run from it.
Listing 5. The lvm command and its subcommands
[root@echidna ~]# lvm lvm> help Available lvm commands: Use 'lvm help <command>' for more information dumpconfig Dump active configuration formats List available metadata formats help Display help for commands lvchange Change the attributes of logical volume(s) lvconvert Change logical volume layout lvcreate Create a logical volume lvdisplay Display information about a logical volume lvextend Add space to a logical volume lvmchange With the device mapper, this is obsolete and does nothing. lvmdiskscan List devices that may be used as physical volumes lvmsadc Collect activity data lvmsar Create activity report lvreduce Reduce the size of a logical volume lvremove Remove logical volume(s) from the system lvrename Rename a logical volume lvresize Resize a logical volume lvs Display information about logical volumes lvscan List all logical volumes in all volume groups pvchange Change attributes of physical volume(s) pvresize Resize physical volume(s) pvck Check the consistency of physical volume(s) pvcreate Initialize physical volume(s) for use by LVM pvdata Display the on-disk metadata for physical volume(s) pvdisplay Display various attributes of physical volume(s) pvmove Move extents from one physical volume to another pvremove Remove LVM label(s) from physical volume(s) pvs Display information about physical volumes pvscan List all physical volumes segtypes List available segment types vgcfgbackup Backup volume group configuration(s) vgcfgrestore Restore volume group configuration vgchange Change volume group attributes vgck Check the consistency of volume group(s) vgconvert Change volume group metadata format vgcreate Create a volume group vgdisplay Display volume group information vgexport Unregister volume group(s) from the system vgextend Add physical volumes to a volume group vgimport Register exported volume group with system vgmerge Merge volume groups vgmknodes Create the special files for volume group devices in /dev vgreduce Remove physical volume(s) from a volume group vgremove Remove volume group(s) vgrename Rename a volume group vgs Display information about volume groups vgscan Search for all volume groups vgsplit Move physical volumes into a new or existing volume group version Display software and driver version information lvm> quit Exiting. |
To give you a brief sampling of LVM in action, I created a GPT
partition for LVM (partition type 0083) on /dev/sdc5 and an MBR partition
for LVM (partition type 83) on /dev/sdd1. You have already created PVs on
these as shown in Listing 6 where you use the
pvscan command to display the PVs on the
system.
Listing 6. Displaying your physical volumes
[root@echidna ~]# pvscan
PV /dev/sdc5 lvm2 [146.43 GiB]
PV /dev/sdd1 lvm2 [232.88 GiB]
Total: 2 [379.32 GiB] / in use: 0 [0 ] / in no VG: 2 [379.32 GiB]
|
Now you will use the vgcreate command to create a
volume group from these two PVs and then use the
lvcreate command to create a logical volume
that is larger than either of the PVs. Finally you will format your new LV
as ext4 and mount it at /mnt/lvdemo as shown in Listing 7.
Listing 7. Creating a volume group and a logical volume
[root@echidna ~]# vgcreate demo-vg /dev/sdc5 /dev/sdd1
Volume group "demo-vg" successfully created
[root@echidna ~]# lvcreate -L 300G -n demo-lv demo-vg
Logical volume "demo-lv" created
[root@echidna ~]# lvscan
ACTIVE '/dev/demo-vg/demo-lv' [300.00 GiB] inherit
[root@echidna ~]# mkfs -t ext4 /dev/demo-vg/demo-lv
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
19660800 inodes, 78643200 blocks
3932160 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
2400 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
This filesystem will be automatically checked every 36 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.
[root@echidna ~]# mount /dev/demo-vg/demo-lv /mnt/lvdemo
[root@echidna ~]# df -h /mnt/lvdemo/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/demo--vg-demo--lv 296G 191M 281G 1% /mnt/lvdemo
|
Note:
- Filesystem commands such as
mkfsandmountaccess the LV using a name like /dev/<vg-name>/<lv-name>. - By default, when you create an LV it immediately becomes
active as shown by the output of the
vgscancommand in Listing 7. If the LV is on a removable drive you need to deactivate it using thelvchangecommand before removing the drive from the system.
To learn more about LVM than this brief introduction provides, refer to the developerWorks article "Logical volume management" (see Resources).
MBR, EBR, GPT and LVM internals
Before you learn about allocating disk space, take a little detour through the internals of MBR, EBR, GPT and LVM partition tables to help reinforce the concepts as they can be difficult to grasp. Note: You do not need this level of detail for the LPI exam, so feel free to skip to Allocating disk space if you are pressed for time or less interested in internals.
The Master Boot Record is the first sector on a hard drive. The MBR contains the bootstrap code, and possibly some other information, followed by the 64-byte partition table and a two-byte boot signature. The 64-byte partition table has four 16-byte entries and starts at offset 446 (1BEh). Table 2 shows the layout of each 16-byte entry.
Table 2. Partition table entry format
| Offset (hex) | Length | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0h | 1 | Status. 80h indicates active (or bootable) partition. |
| 1h | 3 | CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) address of first absolute sector in partition |
| 4h | 1 | Partition type. |
| 5h | 3 | CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) address of last absolute sector in partition |
| 8h | 4 | Logical Block Address (LBA) of first absolute sector in partition. |
| Ch | 4 | Count of sectors in partition |
Look at a real example. The root user can read sectors from a disk
directly using the dd command.
Listing 8 shows the output from dumping
the first 510 bytes of the MBR on /dev/sda, then using the
tail command to select only the last 64 bytes
of the record which you then display in hexadecimal.
Listing 8. Displaying the partition table on /dev/sda
[root@echidna ~]# dd if=/dev/sda bs=510 count=1 2>/dev/null|tail -c 64 |hexdump -C 00000000 80 01 01 00 07 fe ff ff 3f 00 00 00 98 66 b9 08 |........?....f..| 00000010 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 61 5c 39 09 21 c7 17 00 |........a\9.!...| 00000020 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 82 23 51 09 85 ab 68 66 |.........#Q...hf| 00000030 00 fe ff ff 82 fe ff ff d7 66 b9 08 8a f5 7f 00 |.........f......| 00000040 |
Notice that the first record has a status of 80h indicating a bootable
partition and a partition type of 07h, indicating an NTFS partition. The
remaining partition types are 83h (Linux), 05h (Extended), and 82h (Linux
swap), so the disk has three primary partitions and one extended
partition. All of the CHS values are feffff, which is typical on disks
that use LBA. The LBA starting sectors and sector counts are interpreted
as 32-bit little-endian integers, so 98 66 b9 08
represents 08b96698h. So the first (NTFS) partition starts at sector 63
(3fh) and extends for 146368152 (08b96698h) sectors. Thus
fdisk would show an ending sector of
63+146368152-1=146368214.
Notes:
- The partition table in the MBR does not contain any information about logical partitions. You'll see how those are found shortly.
- If your disk uses the CHS values rather than the LBA values, you will need to do some additional arithmetic to translate the CHS values into absolute sectors. Other than using different arithmetic to find the absolute sectors, the principles are the same as those outlined here, so I won't cover CHS computations in this short introduction.
Listing 9. Fdisk output for /dev/sda
[root@echidna ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000de20f Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 146368214 73184076 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 154754145 156312449 779152+ 83 Linux /dev/sda3 156312450 1874448134 859067842+ 5 Extended /dev/sda4 146368215 154754144 4192965 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda5 156312513 336031604 89859546 83 Linux /dev/sda6 336031668 636880859 150424596 83 Linux /dev/sda7 636880923 865983824 114551451 83 Linux /dev/sda8 865983888 949891319 41953716 83 Linux /dev/sda9 949891383 954003959 2056288+ b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda10 954007552 1187801087 116896768 83 Linux /dev/sda11 1187803136 1229760511 20978688 83 Linux /dev/sda12 1229762560 1874446335 322341888 83 Linux Partition table entries are not in disk order |
And indeed /dev/sda1 ends at 146368214.
Note the warning that the partition table entries are not in order. This is
because /dev/sda4, the Linux swap partition is physically before
/dev/sda3, the extended partition. This is not an error, although the
fdisk program and some other tools have options
to rewrite the partition table so that it is neatly in order.
Before you explore extended partitions further, take a quick look at
the graphical output from the gparted command
as that will give you a graphical picture of the partition layout and show
the container nature of the extended partition,
Figure 1 shows the display from the
gparted command for /dev/sda. As noted earlier,
the disk has three primary partitions (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda4, and
/dev/sda2) and one extended partition (/dev/sda3). The extended partition
contains logical partitions /dev/sda5 through /dev/sda12. In the pictorial
display at the top of the image the extended partition is shown as frame
(colored light blue) around the logical partitions.
Figure 1. Using gparted to display of a disk with several partition types
As you saw above, the MBR does not contain partition table entries for the logical partitions; it defines a container that looks to the rest of the system something like a special partition. The logical partitions are defined within this container. So how does this work?
With no hard limit on the number of logical partitions inside an extended partition, no fixed-size partition table defines the logical partitions. Instead, there is an Extended Boot Record (or EBR) for each logical partition. Like the MRB, the EBR is 512 bytes in length and it uses a partition table at offset 446 (1BEh) as for the MBR. Only two entries in the EBR partition table are used. The first defines the offset and size of the current partition and the second defines the offset and count to the end of the next logical partition. For the last logical partition in this singly-linked chain the second entry contains zeroes.
To ease the job of converting little-endian hex digits to decimal
numbers, create a small Bash function to display the first two entries
from an EBR. Then use the formatting string capability of the
hexdump command to display the LBA starting
sector and sector count as decimal numbers instead of hex digits. Listing 10 shows the
showebr function.
Listing 10. Function to display an EBR
showebr ()
{
dd if=$1 skip=$2 bs=512 count=1 2> /dev/null | tail -c 66 |
hexdump -n 32 -e '"%07.7_ax " 8/1 "%2.2x " 2/4 " %12d" "\n"'
}
|
The first EBR is the first sector of your extended partition, so use your
new showebr function to display it using the
sector offset from Listing 9.
Listing 11 shows the output.
Listing 11. The first EBR on /dev/sda
[root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda 156312450 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 63 179719092 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 179719155 300849255 |
The first entry in the EBR partition table shows that the partition (/dev/sda5) starts at offset 63 from this EBR and the partition contains 179719092 sectors. The second entry shows the next EBR starting at offset 179719155 from the first EBR in the extended partition, while the count is the count of sectors starting at the next EBR to the end of the next logical partition. Listing 12 shows the partition information for the extended and logical partitions on /dev/sda. The sector count for /dev/sda6 is 636880859-336031668+1=300849192. Given the sector count of 300849255 in the second entry of Listing 11 you can deduce that /dev/sda6 starts at offset 300849255-300849192=63. This is a common offset for systems, including Windows XP.
Listing 12. Extended and logical partitions on /dev/sda
dev/sda3 156312450 1874448134 859067842+ 5 Extended /dev/sda5 156312513 336031604 89859546 83 Linux /dev/sda6 336031668 636880859 150424596 83 Linux /dev/sda7 636880923 865983824 114551451 83 Linux /dev/sda8 865983888 949891319 41953716 83 Linux /dev/sda9 949891383 954003959 2056288+ b W95 FAT32 /dev/sda10 954007552 1187801087 116896768 83 Linux /dev/sda11 1187803136 1229760511 20978688 83 Linux /dev/sda12 1229762560 1874446335 322341888 83 Linux |
Using what you just learned, along with the
showebr function and some inline shell
arithmetic, you can now walk the entire EBR chain for /dev/sda as shown in
Listing 13.
Listing 13. Walking the chain of logical partitions on /dev/sda
[root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda 156312450 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 63 179719092 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 179719155 300849255 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 179719155 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 63 300849192 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 480568410 229102965 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 480568410 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 63 229102902 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 709671375 83907495 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 709671375 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 63 83907432 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 793578870 4112640 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 793578870 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 0b fe ff ff 63 4112577 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 797691510 233797128 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 797691510 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 3592 233793536 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 1031488638 41959424 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 1031488638 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 2048 41957376 0000010 00 fe ff ff 05 fe ff ff 1073448062 644685824 [root@echidna ~]# showebr /dev/sda $(( 156312450 + 1073448062 )) 0000000 00 fe ff ff 83 fe ff ff 2048 644683776 0000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0 0 |
Notice that one partition has an offset of 3592. This corresponds to the 1.75MB of free space between /dev/sda9 and /dev/sda10. Note also that /dev/sda12 starts at offset 2048 instead of 63. You might find this on drives which use 2048-byte sectors or solid state drives (SSDs) where sector alignment is important.
I mentioned earlier that the MBR layout limits disks with 512-byte sectors to 2TB in size. With the advent of disks larger than 2TB a newer layout called GUID Partition Table or (GPT) was designed. This format can be used on smaller disks, but is required for larger disks. Disk formatting puts a so-called protective MBR in the usual MBR location so that operating systems and utilities that do not understand GPT see the whole disk as an unknown partition type (EEh), with the size appearing to be clipped to either the whole disk or the maximum supported by MBR for the sector size of the disk.
Recent Linux distributions include tools for formatting and booting from
GPT disks, including gdisk (similar to
fdisk), parted,
gparted, grub2, and
recent versions of grub.
Recent Linux systems support booting from GPT partitions using either the traditional PC BIOS or the newer Extensible Firmware Interface (or EFI). Recent 64-bit versions of Windows also support booting from GPT partitions using EFI.
GPT partitions contain a GPT header and a GPT partition array. The GPT partition array contains at least 128 entries, so a GPT disk can support at least 128 primary partitions. The GPT header is in the first sector of the GPT partition and the partition array follows in the next sector. Both the GPT header and the partition array are replicated at the end of the partition. For additional protection the header also contains a 32-bit CRC of the partition array.
Listing 14 shows the output from the
gdisk command for a removable disk (/dev/sdc)
with five primary partitions.
Listing 14. Output from gdisk for /dev/sdc
[root@echidna ~]# gdisk -l /dev/sdc GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.4 Partition table scan: MBR: protective BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: present Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT. Disk /dev/sdc: 3906963456 sectors, 1.8 TiB Logical sector size: 512 bytes Disk identifier (GUID): 7E637BAC-33FC-46D3-9860-6A300CDD0E5F Partition table holds up to 128 entries First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 3906963422 Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries Total free space is 1361893309 sectors (649.4 GiB) Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 2048 773580799 368.9 GiB 0700 Ian's partition 1 2 773580800 1387724799 292.8 GiB 0700 Ian's partition 2 3 1387724800 1831110655 211.4 GiB 0700 4 1831110656 2237978623 194.0 GiB 0700 5 2237978624 2545072127 146.4 GiB 8E00 |
You will find lots more information on GPT in our article "Make the most of large drives with GPT and Linux" (see Resources).
Partitioning for physical and logical volume management
We mentioned above that LVM can utilize a whole disk without the disk first being partitioned. For the same reason that GPT uses a protective MBR, you should create a partition on your disk and then create a PV in the partition rather than using the native LVM capabilities to define the whole disk as a PV. That way, other operating systems that do not understand LVM will recognize that the disk has an unknown partition on it rather than thinking it is not formatted.
The management of the abstraction layers used in LVM obviously requires considerably more information than the original MBR partition table. Other than advising you to create a partition for your PV, we will not further go into the on-disk data structures used by LVM. To learn more about LVM, refer to the developerWorks article "Logical volume management" (see Resources).
As mentioned earlier, a Linux filesystem is a single large tree rooted at /. It is fairly obvious why data on floppy disks or CD-ROMs must be mounted, but perhaps less obvious why you should consider separating data that is stored on hard drives. Some good reasons for separating filesystems include:
- Boot files. Some files must be accessible to the BIOS or boot loader at boot time.
- Multiple hard drives. Typically each hard drive will be divided into one or more partitions, each with a filesystem that must be mounted somewhere in the filesystem tree.
- Shareable files. Several system images may share static files such as executable program files. Dynamic files such as user home directories or mail spool files may also be shared, so that users can log in to any one of several machines on a network and still use the same home directory and mail system.
- Potential overflow. If a filesystem might fill to 100 percent of its capacity, it is usually a good idea to separate this from files that are needed to run the system.
- Quotas. Quotas limit the amount of space that users or groups can take on a filesystem.
- Read-only mounting. Before the advent of journalling filesystems, recovery of a filesystem after a system crash often took a long time. Therefore, you can mount filesystems that seldom change (such as a directory of executable programs) as read-only to reduce the time spent checking it after a system crash.
In addition to the filesystem use covered so far, you also need to consider allocating swap space on disk. For a Linux system, this is usually one, or possibly multiple, dedicated partitions.
Let's assume you are setting up a system that has at least one hard drive, and you want to boot from the hard drive. (This article does not cover setup for a diskless workstation that is booted over a LAN or considerations for using a live CD or DVD Linux system.) Although it may be possible to change partition sizes later, this usually takes some effort, so making good choices up front is important. Let's get started.
Your first consideration is to ensure that your system will be bootable. Some older systems have a limitation that the BIOS can boot only from a partition that is wholly located within the first 1024 cylinders of disk. If you have such a system, then you must create a partition that will eventually be mounted as /boot that will hold the key files needed to boot the system. Once these have been loaded, the Linux system will take over operation of the disk, and the 1024 cylinder limit will not affect further operation of the system. If you need to create a partition for /boot, approximately 100 megabytes (MB) is usually sufficient.
Your next consideration is likely to be the amount of required swap space. With current memory prices, swap space represents a very slow secondary memory. A once common rule of thumb was to create swap space equivalent to the amount of real RAM. Today, you might want to configure one or two times real RAM for a workstation so that you can use several large programs without running out of RAM. Even if it is slow to switch between them, you are probably working in only one or two at any given time.
A large swap space is also advisable for a system with very small memory. For a server, you might want to use a swap space of about half of your RAM, unless you are running an application that recommends a different value. In any event, you should monitor server memory usage so that you can add real RAM or distribute the workload across additional servers if needed. Too much swapping is seldom good on a server. It is possible to use a swap file, but a dedicated partition performs better.
Now we come to a point of divergence. Use of a personal workstation tends to be much less predictable than use of a server. My preference, particularly for new users, is to allocate most of the standard directories (/usr, /opt, /var, etc.) into a single large partition. This is especially useful for new users who may not have a clear idea of what will be installed down the line. A workstation running a graphical desktop and a reasonable number of development tools will likely require 5 or more gigabytes of disk space plus space for user needs. Some larger development tools may require several gigabytes each. I usually allocate somewhere between 40 GB and 60 GB per operating system, and I leave the rest of my disk free to load other distributions.
Server workloads will be more stable, and running out of space in a particular filesystem is likely to be more catastrophic. So, for them, you will generally create multiple partitions, spread across multiple disks, possibly using hardware or software RAID or logical volume groups.
You will also want to consider the workload on a particular filesystem and whether the filesystem is shared among several systems or used by just one system. You may use a combination of experience, capacity planning tools, and estimated growth to determine the best allocations for your system.
Regardless of whether you are configuring a workstation or a server, you will have certain files that are unique for each system located on the local drive. Typically, these include /etc for system parameters, /boot for files needed during boot, /sbin for files needed for booting or system recovery, /root for the root user's home directory, /var/lock for lock files, /var/run for running system information, and /var/log for log files for this system. Other filesystems, such as /home for user home directories, /usr, /opt, /var/mail, or /var/spool/news may be on separate partitions, or network mounted, according to your installation needs and preferences.
Learn
- Use the developerWorks roadmap for
LPIC-1 to find the developerWorks articles to help you study for
LPIC-1 certification based on the April 2009 objectives.
- At the LPIC
Program site, find detailed objectives, task lists, and sample
questions for the three levels of the Linux Professional Institute's Linux
system administration certification. In particular, see their April 2009
objectives for LPI exam 101 and LPI exam 102.
Always refer to the LPIC Program site for the latest objectives. Note the
Exam 101: Objective Changes as of July 2, 2012.
- Review the entire LPI exam prep series on
developerWorks to learn Linux fundamentals and prepare for system
administrator certification based on earlier LPI exam objectives prior to
April 2009.
- Learn more about FHS at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard home
page.
- Learn more about Logical Volume Manager
and LVM2 in Logical
volume management (developerWorks, September 2007).
- Learn more about GUID Partition Tables
(GPT) in the developerWorks article Make the
most of large drives with GPT and Linux (developerWorks, July 2012).
- Read Basic tasks for new Linux
developers (developerWorks, April 2011), learn to open a
terminal window or shell prompt and much more.
- The Linux
Documentation Project has a variety of useful documents,
especially its HOWTOs.
- In the developerWorks Linux zone,
find more resources for Linux developers and system administrators.
- Stay current with developerWorks technical events and Webcasts.
- Follow developerWorks on
Twitter.
Get products and technologies
- Download
the System rescue CD-Rom, one of many
tools available online to help you recover a system after a crash.
- With IBM trial software, available
for download directly from developerWorks, build your next development project on Linux.
Discuss
- Participate in the discussion forum.
- Get involved in the developerWorks Community.
Connect with other developerWorks users while exploring the
developer-driven blogs, forums, groups, and wikis.
Ian Shields works on a multitude of Linux projects for the developerWorks Linux zone. He is a Senior Programmer at IBM at the Research Triangle Park, NC. He joined IBM in Canberra, Australia, as a Systems Engineer in 1973, and has since worked on communications systems and pervasive computing in Montreal, Canada, and RTP, NC. He has several patents and has published several papers. His undergraduate degree is in pure mathematics and philosophy from the Australian National University. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from North Carolina State University. Learn more about Ian in Ian's profile on developerWorks Community.
