up all night.. fdisk questions

I got a shinny new bbb today… havent stopped playing with for the last 9 hours… so im kind of tired.

I have a BBB runing debian 7.2 from a 8GB micro sd.

all is working fine with debian, its running headless at the moment which is fine with me. when I installed the debian image to the sd card, there was some space “at the end of the card” that I wanted to reclame. I did a little poking around and some thing is a … odd. I could use some input. i am not a total noob but im by no means an expert with linux.

I ran df -h to find what was used and where

that looks fine… then I ran fdisk -l to see what i could see. I am not quite sure how to interprate this

1 how does /dev/mmcblkboot0 and mmcblkboot1 not cotain a valid partition table? what does that mean exactly? how does this boot without a valid partition?
2 why or how, does the sd card boot start at 2048? and use a fat12? I have never even heard of a fat 12 file system…
3 given the boot is starting where is it, and the 2nd primary is about 3.6gb? I have a bout 3.7ish GB to make a partition out of? I think 8gb sd is relly 7.39ish?

please double check my math.

how big should I make swap? I used to double the ram back in the when you always had a swap disk… but most boxes today have so much ram there is no need and it has been like a million years from the last time I have worked with something like … this … small… or with something that has this amout of resoruces:)

thanks guys… im going to bed, its 2 am.

1 how does /dev/mmcblkboot0 and mmcblkboot1 not cotain a valid partition
table? what does that mean exactly? how does this boot without a valid
partition?

It's a new feature of the "eMMC" spec, it's not utilized by current am335x
silicon... Just ignore...

2 why or how, does the sd card boot start at 2048? and use a fat12? I have
never even heard of a fat 12 file system..

2048 was set by the creator..

fat12's been around for a long time, just not normally used today:

3 given the boot is starting where is it, and the 2nd primary is about
3.6gb? I have a bout 3.7ish GB to make a partition out of? I think 8gb sd
is relly 7.39ish?

You used someone's "4GB" image, just extend it with gparted..

please double check my math.

how big should I make swap? I used to double the ram back in the when you
always had a swap disk.. but most boxes today have so much ram there is no
need and it has been like a million years from the last time I have worked
with something like .. this .. small... or with something that has this
amout of resoruces:)

It depends on your application... Just remember, flash wears out, using
swap definitely doesn't help that issue..

Regards,

Do you guys not use swap?

my purpose for this device is to run a filtering proxy server for my home. I have kids with different needs and different levels of filtering. I had not considered flash wearing out. My understanding is that it would take years. But I had not looked in to the matter. I think it will use micro sd card till have a working solution. Then consider where I put what partitions.

Do people using the BBB with SD not normally use a swap partition?

Thanks

Do you guys not use swap?

my purpose for this device is to run a filtering proxy server for my home.
I have kids with different needs and different levels of filtering. I had
not considered flash wearing out. My understanding is that it would take
years. But I had not looked in to the matter. I think it will use micro sd
card till have a working solution. Then consider where I put what
partitions.

Depends on workload, for a simple proxy you don't need it.

Do people using the BBB with SD not normally use a swap partition?

With 512Mb of ram, for most applications users don't need swap. So review
your workload. :wink:

Regards,

fair enough

thanks again