Like most other operating systems, CLFS is usually installed on a dedicated partition. The recommended approach to building a CLFS system is to use an available empty partition or, if you have enough unpartitioned space, to create one. However, if you're building for a different architecture you can simply build everything in “/mnt/clfs” and transfer it to your target machine.
A minimal system requires around 6 gigabytes (GB). This is enough to store all the source tarballs and compile the packages. The CLFS system itself will not take up this much room. A large portion of this requirement is to provide sufficient free temporary storage. Compiling packages can require a lot of disk space which will be reclaimed after the package is installed. If the CLFS system is intended to be the primary Linux system, additional software will probably be installed which will require additional space (2-10 GB).
Because there is not always enough Random Access Memory (RAM) available for compilation processes, it is a good idea to use a small disk partition as swap space. This is used by the kernel to store seldom-used data and leave more memory available for active processes. The swap partition for an CLFS system can be the same as the one used by the host system, in which case it is not necessary to create another one.
Open Firmware and the Mac OS's impose certain requirements on
partitioning. This is discussed in Appendix E.
In particular, you cannot use fdisk, you will need an
apple_bootstrap
partition, and that should precede any
OSX partition.
Start a disk partitioning program such as parted
with a command line option naming the hard
disk on which the new partition will be created—for example
/dev/hda
for the primary
Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) disk. Create at least an apple bootstrap
partition, a Linux native partition, and a swap partition, if needed. Please
refer to parted(8)
if you do not yet know how to use the
programs.
Remember the designation of the new partition (e.g.,
hda5
). This book will refer to
this as the CLFS partition. Also remember the designation of the swap
partition. These names will be needed later for the
/etc/fstab
file. You will also need to know the
designation of the apple_bootstrap partition for the yaboot.conf
when you set this up before you run ybin.