On Feb 18, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <o...@debian.org> wrote: > * another use-case is to be able to share an identical `/usr` over a network > link; hence booting an initramfs, mounting a local `/`, then mounting `/usr` > over the network. It seems that an initramfs with everything needed to mount > a filesystem over a network link directly actually has a smaller footprint. A MAJOR use case is to share /usr among different containers so that they use the same software (which then can be updated centrally) but different data and configurations. It is a longer term goal of some projects to support booting new a system with empty /etc and /var directories, i.e. basically an empty / partition and software coming from the (possibly read only, possibly snapshotted, etc) /usr partition.
> * booting with `/` only is not systematically tested in Debian anymore; Nowadays this will surely to not work at all, at least in a default install. E.g. libkmod2 is in /usr/lib/. I think that it can be safely said that Debian does not support booting systems with a standalone /usr/ and no initramfs. > In Debian buster, the current testing suite, "merged `/usr`" is only > considered > for implementation with symlinks (there are no proposals for simply dropping > `/{bin,sbin,lib*}`) and is implemented in two main ways: For clarity: I am not aware of anybody anywhere proposing to drop the /{bin,sbin,lib*} links, for Debian or any other distribution. Thank you for this excellent summary. -- ciao, Marco
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