On 14 March 2012 18:56, Zac Medico <zmed...@gentoo.org> wrote: > Whatever the arguments may be, the whole discussion boils down to the > fact that the only people who seem to have a "problem" are those that > have a separate /usr partition and simultaneously refuse to use an > initramfs.
I wonder if it might help to go through the benefits of having a separate /usr, and see whether they still work when /usr is mounted by initramfs. Hopefully that would either demonstrate that the initramfs approach is fine, or reveal a concrete problem with it so we can start talking about solutions. (For the record, I don't have a separate /usr, but mainly because when I've been setting up machines I've been too lazy to either 1) figure out how much space to allocate to each partition, or 2) learn how to use lvm so I don't have to worry so much about getting it right the first time. I'd prefer for the option to stay available, but not as strongly as some people do.) To start us off, the benefit that I'm mainly interested in (for potential future use, as stated above), and I realise this is probably pretty far down the list overall, is that OpenRC can run fsck at shutdown instead of boot for non-/ filesystems, so as long as / is small there won't be huge boot delays. I imagine using initramfs wouldn't affect this, as by the time the system's shutting down it shouldn't matter how /usr got mounted originally. It might be affected if fsck etc got moved to /usr as has been mentioned, but if that happened OpenRC would probably have to be modified to remount it readonly at shutdown rather than unmount it, and presumably that would allow the fsck to occur. Would anyone else like to continue with their own favourite separate-/usr reason?
