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These partitioning recommendations draw from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) library. Poolside does not provide STIG-specific implementation guidance or support for customer-defined STIG policies. For hardening sequence, validated baselines, and compatibility exceptions, see STIG hardening considerations.

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Partitioning overview

This page shows recommended partition sizing for single-node Poolside on-premises model deployments running RKE2 and explains how model checkpoints affect storage requirements. The checkpoint estimates cover these model artifacts:

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Partition recommendations for STIG-hardened hosts

For STIG-hardened Linux nodes, Poolside recommends the following partition layout and sizing as a minimum for the listed models: The listed partition sizes total approximately 1 TB.

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Dedicated /opt/poolside partition for model artifacts

STIG controls recommend dedicated partitions to prevent system partitions from filling up and causing denial of service. Poolside recommends placing model artifact storage on a dedicated /opt/poolside partition rather than the root filesystem. Without separation, model artifact growth can render the OS unusable.

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STIG mount option recommendations

  • /tmp and /var/tmp should include noexec in the mount options to reduce the risk of executing files from temporary directories.
  • /var/log should include noexec in the mount options to reduce the risk of executing files from log directories.
  • /var/lib cannot include noexec. The container runtime runs binaries from overlay layers stored there. Adding noexec here breaks Kubernetes pods.

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Inference storage impact

When you run inference workloads, each inference pod loads model checkpoints from SeaweedFS into a storage-backed emptyDir volume under /var/lib/kubelet. This means you store at least two copies of the model checkpoint on disk: one copy in SeaweedFS and one copy in the emptyDir volume for each running pod. Each inference workload consumes disk space equal to its model checkpoint size: Plan for sufficient free space in /var/lib to accommodate your largest model’s checkpoint size for each running inference pod.

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Scaling prioritization guidance

If you need to scale storage, allocate additional space in this priority order:
  1. /var/lib: Scales per model deployed in-cluster
  2. /opt/poolside: Scales with model checkpoints
  3. /home: Scales with Terraform files. The Poolside Terraform bundle packages container upgrade images.
Core OS partitions (/, /boot, /tmp, /var, /var/tmp, /var/log) can remain fixed regardless of total disk size.