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2.4.1.4. Convenience Partitions
There are several other partitions that are not required, but should be considered when designing a disk layout. The following list is not comprehensive, but is meant as a guide.
• /boot – Highly recommended. Use this partition to store kernels and other booting information. To minimize potential boot problems with larger disks, make this the first physical partition on your first disk drive. A partition size of 100 megabytes is quite adequate.
• /home – Highly recommended. Share your home directory and user customization across multiple distributions or LFS builds. The size is generally fairly large and depends on available disk space.
• /usr – A separate /usr partition is generally used if providing a server for a thin client or diskless workstation. It is normally not needed for LFS. A size of five gigabytes will handle most installations.
• /opt – This directory is most useful for BLFS where multiple installations of large packages like Gnome or KDE can be installed without embedding the files in the /usr hierarchy. If used, 5 to 10 gigabytes is generally adequate.
• /tmp – A separate /tmp directory is rare, but useful if configuring a thin client. This partition, if used, will usually not need to exceed a couple of gigabytes.
• /usr/src – This partition is very useful for providing a location to store BLFS source files and share them across LFS builds. It can also be used as a location for building BLFS packages. A reasonably large partition of 30-50 gigabytes allows plenty of room.
Any separate partition that you want automatically mounted upon boot needs to be specified in the /etc/fstab. Details about how to specify partitions will be discussed in Section 8.2, “Creating the /etc/fstab File”.