Debian Partition Scheme

Default Recommended Scheme

In Debian 9, these are are recommended minimum schemes and allocations scheme from Debian Manual. We often look into 2 forms: single root scheme or split scheme.

Single Root Scheme a.k.a. Atomic (/)

For single root scheme, it's plain simple: you need 3 partitions:

  1. /boot ➟ 250 MiB ~ 1 GiB | ext2 filesystem
  2. swap ➟ 0 OR equal to RAM size
  3. / ➟ 150 MiB to rest of the disk | ext4 filesystem

Split Scheme (/, /home)

  1. /boot ➟ 250 MiB ~ 1 GiB | ext2 filesystem
  2. swap ➟ 0 OR equal to RAM size
  3. / ➟ 250 MiB ~ 40% of disk OR 250GB | ext4 filesystem
  4. /home ➟ Remaining of the disk | ext4 filesystem

Split Scheme (/, /home, /tmp)

  1. /boot ➟ 250 MiB ~ 1 GiB | ext2 filesystem
  2. swap ➟ 0 OR equal to RAM size
  3. / ➟ 250 MiB ~ 40% of disk OR 250GB
  4. /tmp ➟ 25 MiB ~ 50 MiB
  5. /home ➟ Remaining of the disk

Split Scheme (/, /home, /tmp, /var)

  1. /boot ➟ 250 MiB ~ 1 GiB | ext2 filesystem
  2. swap ➟ 0 OR equal to RAM size
  3. / ➟ 250 MiB ~ 40% of disk OR 250GB
  4. /tmp ➟ 25 MiB ~ 50 MiB
  5. /var ➟ 2 GiB ~ 3 Gib OR 100 GiB (depending on what you plan to do, e.g. libvirt takes a lot of space)
  6. /home ➟ Remaining of the disk

That's all about Partition Scheme for Debian operating system.