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I'm a longtime Fedora user and I've just installed FC15. The new partition layout is confusing to me, as I'm used to the "plain vanilla" partitions that previous versions used.

[root@localhost ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                7.9G  596M  6.9G   8% /
udev                  496M     0  496M   0% /dev
tmpfs                 502M     0  502M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                 502M  288K  501M   1% /run
/dev/mapper/vg00-lv00
                      7.9G  596M  6.9G   8% /
tmpfs                 502M     0  502M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                 502M     0  502M   0% /media
/dev/sda1             194M   20M  165M  11% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg00-lv03
                      2.0G  312M  1.6G  17% /var
/dev/mapper/vg00-lv02
                       20G  172M   19G   1% /home

I understand that the tmpfs partitions are mounted from an internal RAM disk. But what is this new rootfs partition and why does it appear to be mounting / twice?

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4
  • Never understood why Fedora needed so many partitions, especially on a single hard drive system
    – TheLQ
    Jun 1, 2011 at 20:50
  • 3
    These are not partitions. They are filesystems. The df tool operates in terms of mounted filesystems, and doesn't necessarily tell one anything at all (c.f. the LVM filesystems, here) about actual partitions on the disc. For that one uses tools such as gdisk and gparted.
    – JdeBP
    Jun 1, 2011 at 21:57
  • The default Fedora installation will just create the / filesystem plus the ramdisk ones. I created the /var and /home ones myself.
    – Barry Brown
    Jun 3, 2011 at 7:59
  • Similar on Super User: superuser.com/questions/576723/…
    – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com
    May 14, 2015 at 20:55

2 Answers 2

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19

rootfs is a special tempfs image used in initram, and stays in this instance because you have an encrypted LVM setup. Normally, init would overwrite rootfs with the actual mounted / file system, but Fedora may not have that fixed with your setup. There is no harm in it.

see: http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt

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3

I think this is a side-effect of symlinking /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts as this forum post suggests.

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