On 2012-12-16, Bruce Hill wrote: > On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 05:10:43PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: >> >> That was the original reason for having / and /usr separate, and it >> dates back to the early 70s. The other reason that stems from that time >> period is the size of disks we had back then - they were tiny and often >> a minimal / was all that could really fit on the primary system drive. >> >> Gradually over time this setup became the norm and people started to >> depend on it, and more importantly, started to believe it was important >> to retain it. It's their right to believe that. >> >> Recently I decided to measure if I still needed a separate /usr (I was >> a long time advocate of retaining it). I'm in the lucky position of >> having ~200 Linux machines, all distinctly different, at my disposal, >> so I trawled through memory and incident logs looking for cases where a >> separate /usr was crucial to recovery after any form of error. To my >> surprise, I found none at all and those logs go back 5 years. >> >> So I got to change my mind (not something I do very often I admit) and >> concluded that separate base and user systems (/ and /usr) was no >> longer something I needed to do - the "system" - disks, hardware and >> the software on the disks - was very reliable, and what I really needed >> was ability to boot from USB rescue disks. I did find, not >> unsurprisingly, that I also really needed /usr/local on a separate >> partition but that's because of how we install our in-house software >> here, plus our backup policies. >> >> It also goes without saying that these days we >> need /home, /var, /var/log and /tmp to all be on their own filesystem, >> and we need that more than ever. >> >> I thought I should just toss that in the ring for people who are >> undecided where they stand on the debate of separate / vs /usr. It's >> what I found on our production, dev and staging servers, plus a whole >> lot of people's personal workstations (sysadmins and devs). The >> environment is a large corporate ISP that defies categorization, we >> almost have at least one of every imaginable use-case for running on >> Linux except something in the Top 100 SuperComputer list. I reckon it's >> about as representative as I'm ever gonna see. >> >> People are free to draw their own conclusions as always, and real data >> is valuable in arriving at those conclusions. YMMV. > > Thanks for sharing your experience, and not just your emotions. One of my > favorite quotes is, "A man with an experience is not subject to a man with an > argument."
My thanks, too! There's nothing like reading on some actual experience with this. So this was once the reason to keep / separate. Not that important anymore (but this is still no excuse to force people to keep /usr in the same filesystem). -- Nuno Silva (aka njsg) http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/
