On Fri, 14 Dec 2012 08:53:35 -0800 Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess the other question that's lurking here for me is why do you > have /usr on a separate partition? What's the usage model that drives > a person to do that? The most I've ever done is move /usr/portage and > /usr/src to other places. My /usr never has all that much in it beyond > those two directories, along with maybe /usr/share. Would it not be > easier for you in the long run to move /usr back to / and not have to > deal with this question at all? It should be moving in the other direction for stability reasons and busybox is no full answer. On OpenBSD which has the benefit of userland being part of it. All the critical single user binaries are in root and built statically as much as possible, maximising system reliability no matter the custom requirements or packages. The way I have it on OpenBSD / ro 100 megabytes and I never need to fsck and can reliably fix all but the most likely problem and snapshot quickly, though there is no need as the kernel is rock solid. /usr ro,nodev ~600 megabytes that I almost never need to fsck even when I pull the plug /usr/local ro,nodev,nosuid All installed packages go here and I can give users the ability to only mount writeable this location. There are other plusses I won't bother going into. All the BSDs and debian stable (old and initramfs) still get's this right with debian suggesting a seperate /usr during install in compliance with the filesystem hiearchical standard and the upcoming draft/version 3, which states the real technical and uptime benefits of a seperate /usr. https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/FHS Unfortunately stability and security often only get's noticed and chosen over other function when it's completely obliterated and has stopped functioning alltogether. When hard worked (including rusty russel) documents like this get ignored when freedesktop.org is given so much credence even though freedesktop.org is actually simply stating opinion without having debate/comments on it's site and in contrast a combined root/usr has no technical benefit not addressed elsewhere (grub etc..) and when the issues in userland are far from insurmountable it is quite worrying and I am grateful to those who have stood up against this and the trend of added complexity into pid1/systemd and early boot. What is also worrying is the recent trends of the kits, udisks dropping features for months to get multiseat and dbus getting everywhere like Windows and RPC. I can take spread out documentation compared to OpenBSD but some of these issues are quite rediculous, I just wish OpenBSD had more devs for KMS and stable updates as it is perhaps due to being a smaller project involving both core userland and kernel and with hard fast goals, far better managed.
