Recommended Partitioning Scheme - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4 - INSTALLATION GUIDE FOR IBM S-390 AND IBM ESERVER ZSERIES Installation Manual

Chapter 2. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux
point. Double-click on the partition or click the Edit button.
• Type: This field shows the partition's file system type (for example, ext2 or ext3).
• Format: This field shows if the partition being created will be formatted.
• Size (MB): This field shows the partition's size (in MB).
• Start: This field shows the cylinder on your hard drive where the partition begins.
• End: This field shows the cylinder on your hard drive where the partition ends.
Hide RAID device/LVM Volume Group members: Select this option if you do not want to view
any RAID device or LVM Volume Group members that have been created.

9.4. Recommended Partitioning Scheme

The following is a list of recommendations for partitioning your system:
• A swap partition (at least 256 MB) — swap partitions are used to support virtual memory. In
other words, data is written to a swap partition when there is not enough RAM to store the
data your system is processing.
• If you are unsure about what size swap partition to create, make it twice the amount of RAM
on your machine. It must be of type swap.
• Creation of the proper amount of swap space varies depending on a number of factors
including the following (in descending order of importance):
• The applications running on the machine.
• The amount of physical RAM installed on the machine.
• The version of the OS.
• Swap should equal 2x physical RAM for up to 2 GB of physical RAM, and then 1x physical
RAM for any amount above 2 GB, but never less than 32 MB.
Using this formula, a system with 2 GB of physical RAM would have 4 GB of swap, while one
with 3 GB of physical RAM would have 5 GB of swap. Creating a large swap space partition
can be especially helpful if you plan to upgrade your RAM at a later time.
• For systems with really large amounts of RAM (more than 32 GB) you can likely get away
with a smaller swap partition (around 1x, or less, of physical RAM).
• A partition (500 MB - 5.0 GB) — this is where "
root
setup, all files — except for files stored in
(on ia64) — are on the root partition.
/boot/efi
A 500 MB partition allows you to install a minimal installation, while a 5.0 GB root partition lets
28
" (the root directory) is located. In this
/
(on x86, AMD64, and Intel EM64T) or
/boot