Disk Configuration

Fedora Workstation uses a different default disk configuration from other Fedora Editions and Spins. This page describes that configuration along with the motivations behind it.

Other, non-default, disk configuration options are available to be used with Workstation, and can be configured during the disk partitioning step in the installer.

Btrfs

Btrfs is the default filesystem used by Fedora Workstation. Btrfs has two key advantages for users using the default filesystem configuration:

  1. Transparent compression means that data stored on disk uses less space

  2. System reinstallation while preserving user data can be supported, while avoiding the issue of volumes running out of space. This is due to the fact that Btrfs subvolumes are not limited to a static predefined size.

Btrfs also provides a range of other features, such as snapshotting and online shrinking, which can be useful for those who want to use them, and can potentially be the basis of future user-facing features.

Fedora Magazine contains a number of excellent articles about Btrfs.

Default Disk Layout

By default, a Workstation installation has the following disk layout:

Role Filesystem Mount Point

EFI System Partition

FAT 32

/boot/efi

Boot Partition

ext4

/boot

Root Subvolume

Btrfs

/

Home Subvolume

Btrfs

/home

The first two partitions are common to all Fedora installations, and are required for booting the system. The root subvolume contains the system installation, and the home subvolume contains user data and settings.

Swap on ZRAM

Fedora Workstation does not use a dedicated swap partition. Instead, it uses zram: an emulated drive that uses RAM for its storage. RAM-based swap is faster than disk-based swap, which avoids the extreme system slowdown and thrashing that can happen with a traditional swap partition.

The zram drive is compressed, to make efficient use of the available memory, and is assigned memory dynamically, meaning that it only uses system RAM when swap is needed.

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›