[sf-lug] Chromebooks' partitioning optimizing

[Michael Paoli]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2026 at 3:45 PM Michael Paoli <michael.paoli at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Well, there are additional means besides symbolic link(s).
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2026 at 11:46 AM <aaronco36 at sdf.org> wrote:
> > The Chromebooks' default internal 16.0 GB /dev/mmcblk0p as

Another thought that comes to mind, go rather to quite limited on the
relatively small non-upgradable internal storage, and use other (e.g.
[micro]SD) for everything else (though USB generally wouldn't be
recommended ... though maybe by USB-C that might be more reasonable?).
Just use a distro where that's reasonably well supported, preferably including
at install time.  So, yeah, don't have to have most or all on
root (/) filesystem, in fact that can be rather to quite small.  Likewise
/boot, and EFI.  So, EFI boot, need EFI filesysetm for that,
that can then probably boot OS proper or load another boot loader (e.g. GRUB)
from more-or-less wherever.
So, e.g. my main system, look at the storage, and how much
is/isn't on /, /boot, and /boot/efi:
$ df -h / /boot /boot/efi
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/tigger-root  1.7G   80M  1.5G   6% /
/dev/md3                 963M  310M  631M  33% /boot
/dev/sda2               1019M  4.0K 1019M   1% /boot/efi
$ (cd /sys/block && grep . sd[ab]/size) | tr / : | awk -F:
'{printf("%s %0.2f TiB\n",$1,$3/2/1024/1024/1024);}'
sda 1.82 TiB
sdb 1.86 TiB
$ eval df -x\ {binfmt_mist,devpts,devtmpfs,fuse.portal,overlay,proc,pstore,securityfs,sysfs,tmpfs}
| awk '{if(NR>=2)k=k+$2}; END {printf("%s currently mounted persistent
local filesystems, total %0.2f GiB\n",NR-1,k/1024/1024);}'
31 currently mounted persistent local filesystems, total 950.05 GiB
$
So, e.g., /usr, /var, /home, /boot, /boot/efi, / (root), along with
many more, all separate filesystems.  Boot device only needs have, as
applicable, boot block (for MBR), EFI (/boot/efi), /boot (if
filesystem separate from root (/) and using MBR for boot device), and
root (/) filesystem (if it contains /boot and we're not using EFI to
boot).  That's it.  Relatively little needs be present on the boot
device.

And can get microSD up to 2TB.  :-)