I recently installed debian 12 using debian-12.2.0-arm64-netinst.iso. It is the only OS installed and I used the whole 500GB disk.

I selected something like guided partitioning with separate /home/ using LVM and encryption. Now that I am using my system a bit, I realize that I don’t think it ever asked me how big to make the / partition and it is very small. Only 27GB.

Will this be a problem?

Or, is the LVM going to allow the partition to be resized or otherwise take up as much of the space as it requires?

# lsblk
NAME                    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sda                       8:0    0 476.9G  0 disk  
├─sda1                    8:1    0   512M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─sda2                    8:2    0   488M  0 part  /boot
└─sda3                    8:3    0   476G  0 part  
  └─sda3_crypt          253:0    0 475.9G  0 crypt 
    ├─mycomputer--vg-root     253:1    0  27.9G  0 lvm   /
    ├─mycomputer--vg-swap_1   253:2    0   976M  0 lvm   [SWAP]
    └─mycomputer--vg-home     253:3    0   447G  0 lvm   /home

I tried booting into a live usb to resize the partition using gparted but I couldn’t seem to do so.

If I need to reinstall and change something I’d rather do it now than later.

  • @duncesplayedEnglish
    4•8 months ago

    This is my one gripe with Debian’s installer. I don’t mind it setting defaults like 27G for / and 10G or whatever for /tmp. But I don’t like that you can’t stop it from allocating the entire volume. If it left a few hundred GB unallocated, then it would be trivial to expand whichever one you realize you need to expand later on.

    As it is, if you want to give more room to one partition or another later on, you have to shrink /home first. If /home is ext4, that’s inconvenient. If it’s XFS, though, it’s a nightmare.