Installation guide

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4 .19.4 . Recommended Part it ioning Scheme
4.19 .4 .1. It anium syst e ms
Unless you have a reason for doing otherwise, we recommend that you create the following partitions for
Itanium systems:
A /boot/efi/ partition (100 MB minimum) — the partition mounted on /boot/efi/ contains all
the installed kernels, the initrd images, and ELILO configuration files.
Warning
You must create a /boot/efi/ partition of type VFAT and at least 100 MB in size as the
first primary partition.
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.
In years past, the recommended amount of swap space increased linearly with the amount of RAM
in the system. But because the amount of memory in modern systems has increased into the
hundreds of gigabytes, it is now recognized that the amount of swap space that a system needs is
a function of the memory workload running on that system. However, given that swap space is
usually designated at install time, and that it can be difficult to determine beforehand the memory
workload of a system, we recommend determining system swap using the following table.
T ab le 4 .2. Reco mmen ded Syst em Swap Sp ace
Amo u n t o f RAM in t h e Syst em Reco mmen ded Amo u nt of Swap Sp ace
4GB of RAM or less a minimum of 2GB of swap space
4GB to 16GB of RAM a minimum of 4GB of swap space
16GB to 64GB of RAM a minimum of 8GB of swap space
64GB to 256GB of RAM a minimum of 16GB of swap space
256GB to 512GB of RAM a minimum of 32GB of swap space
Note that you can obtain better performance by distributing swap space over multiple storage
devices, particularly on systems with fast drives, controllers, and interfaces.
A root partition (3.0 GB - 5.0 GB) — this is where "/" (the root directory) is located. In this setup,
all files (except those stored in /boot/efi) are on the root partition.
A 3.0 GB partition allows you to install a minimal installation, while a 5.0 GB root partition lets
you perform a full installation, choosing all package groups.
4.19 .4 .2. x8 6 , AMD6 4 , and Int e l® 6 4 syst em s
Unless you have a reason for doing otherwise, we recommend that you create the following partitions for x86,
AMD64, and Intel® 64 systems:
Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 5 Inst allat ion G uide
4 6