A Fedora system has at least three partitions:

Many systems have more partitions than the minimum listed above. Choose partitions based on your particular system needs. For example, consider creating a separate /home partition on systems that store user data. Refer to Section 12.5, “Advice on Partitions” for more information.

If you are not sure how best to configure the partitions for your computer, accept the default partition layout.

The RAM installed in your computer provides a pool of memory for running systems. Linux systems use swap partitions to expand this pool, by automatically moving portions of memory between RAM and swap partitions if insufficient RAM is available. In addition, certain power management features store all of the memory for a suspended system in the available swap partitions. If you manually specify the partitions on your system, create one swap partition that has more capacity than the computer RAM.

Data partitions provide storage for files. Each data partition has a mount point, to indicate the system directory whose contents reside on that partition. A partition with no mount point is not accessible by users. Data not located on any other partition resides in the / (or root) partition.

In the minimum configuration shown above:

Subdirectories may be assigned to partitions as well. Some administrators create both /usr and /usr/local partitions. In that case, files under /usr/local, such as /usr/local/bin/foo, are on the /usr/local partition. Any other files in /usr/, such as /usr/bin/foo, are in the /usr partition.

If you create many partitions instead of one large / partition, upgrades become easier. Refer to the description of Disk Druid's Edit option for more information.