Re: [gentoo-user] Advice/best practices for a new Gentoo installation

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Willie Wong writes:

> On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 12:52:55PM +0100, Alex Schuster wrote:

> > I thought the small files of the portage tree especially profit from
> > the notail option in reiserfs? Did you change the block size?
> 
> You mean the other way around, right?

Oh dear. Yes. Thanks.

> reiser defaults to tail-packing,
> which can cause problems with GRUB and LILO, which is why notail is an
> option which turns off tail-packing for those crazy enough to use
> reiser on /boot.
> 
> If you use notail on the portage tree, you get rid of that advantage,
> then Neil is absolutely correct: there's not too much point in
> journaling the portage tree, and if you actively make reiser
> not-competitive on the storage-space direction, the only metric left
> to compare is speed, and ext2 is faster.
> 
> Incidentally, if you are willing to sacrifice speed for space, then a
> sparsefile for /usr/portage may also be an option.

I had this once on a smaller machine, but now I'd prefer it the other way 
around, there's plenty of space available. I have 15G for distfiles and 
pkgdir, so I don't worry about some 100MB for the portage tree.

	Wonko