On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Mike Edenfield <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip] > As you move more and more software off of /usr into / you start to realize > that the idea of "tiny partition that contains just what I need to boot and > mount /usr" is becoming "not so tiny" anymore. The distinction between what > is "boot" software versus "user" software gets less clear. Then it's just > question of how far you take this process before you reach your personal > threshold of questioning why you have two partitions at all. Whether you > reach that point or not depends on how complex your boot process is, what > you actually need running to boot, and how personally invested in a split > /usr you happen to be :) This extends directly by analogy to having binaries on /usr mounted on anything other than plain disk. Say you wanted to have / on LVM on RAID6. Now you don't have any choice but to move stuff from /usr/* to your initramfs, since the kernel isn't even going to automount your RAID for you if you're not using the 0.9 metadata format, and you've still got to cope with LVM. As you say, the boundary between user software and boot software grows less and less clear, and your *initramfs* grows bigger and bigger. How long will there remain *any point* to LVM or software RAID, once you have to preload the bulk of your operating system into RAM before you can access their contents? One shouldn't need an entire operating system preloaded into RAM before being able to access the current versions of anything. The *real* fun is going to start once you get daemons which happen to need to be launched while you're still in your initramfs stage, and then you need to restart those daemons as part of an update later in the system's uptime. That's going to be a fun one to solve. -- :wq
