[Pcbsd-developer] 1.3 partitions layout suggestions:

[Andrei K. <an...@bs...>]

1.3 partitions layout suggestions:	

For disk encryption feature, videly used on notebooks, I suggest to make 
default partitions scheme like this:

scheme nr1:
/boot		150MB
swap	1000MB
/		rest of free space
/usr/home  mounted from file:/usr/homespace	(custom size, possible encrypted)

scheme nr2:
/boot		150MB
swap	1000MB
/		2GB (userland and logs)
/usr		rest of free space (/usr/home, /usr/src, /usr/port, etc...)

Explanation: 
If you need root space encryption then we need at least one "plain" space from 
where we can boot kernel and where to store encryption keys. For more 
information about FreeBSD encryption I'd suggest to look at this webpage:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/1139.en.html
We may even make /boot partition read-only for better crash resistance.

Another idea is to use /home as file backed encrypted filesystem- then we can 
do backup by just copying /usr/homespace.eli file to NAS server or write it 
onto CD/DVD. Possibilities are endless.

We can add swap space as file based filesystem (256MB file as SWAP space):

# dd if=/dev/null of=/usr/swap0 bs=1m count=256
# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /usr/swap0 -u 1
# swapon /dev/md1

Type: "mdconfig -lu 1" to check md1 disk state.

P.S. I  already played with different encryption technologies here and found 
FreeBSD existing features very reliable.


Andrei