On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Didier Kryn <k...@in2p3.fr> wrote: > > > Le 29/04/2015 22:34, Hendrik Boom a écrit : > >> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:47:27AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote: >> >>> I'm under the impression you can do most or all of what needs to be >>> done in the actual init, rather than the initramfs. This gets a little >>> complicated now that Linux has been "improved" by having /sbin >>> and /bin be symlinks to /usr/bin, which might not be mounted in early >>> boot, but aside from that, I think once you have possession of /bin >>> and /sbin, then assuming that /etc is not a mountpoint, I think most >>> other stuff can be delayed til the real init, always assuming that it's >>> easier to put stuff in the on-disk init than in initramfs. >>> >> Is that Linux that has been "improved" by turning /sbin and /bin into >> symlinks? Or is it Debian? Or the systemd collection of distros? >> >> -- hendrik >> >> Here's the story I read about /usr, and it sounds like the truth: > > When people built the first Unix machine, the first disk, containing > /bin went full but they needed to add more files to /bin . They decided to > put them on the second disk which contained user data and was therefore > mounted at /usr. Hence /usr/bin. It was a technical workaround for > disk-size limitation. > > Nowadays some distros got rid of /usr but still make it a symlink to / > because of softwares that rely on it. If Debian is now doing sort of the > opposite, it must be some trick. I've nothing against; as long as you keep > /usr, use it at your will; it's all about convenience tricks.
Even these days, in some UNIXes (OpenBSD comes to mind), /bin and /sbin differ from /usr/bin and /usr/sbin in that they only contain statically-linked programs. This is useful for doing things like upgrading the rest of the system, so you have a way to recover from catastrophic errors (like /usr or /lib becoming unusable). -Jude
_______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
