On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:02:02AM -0400, Mike Edenfield wrote:
> > From: Alan Mackenzie [mailto:a...@muc.de]
> > Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 9:37 AM
> > My question: what, technically, prevents me from copying the booting
> > software instead to /sbin and booting the system that way?
> Nothing; in fact, this was the general solution to the problem of "something
> else in /usr/{sbin,bin,lib} is needed at boot" for a long time. More and
> more software was getting moved into /{s,}bin, and in particular into /lib,
> to make it available in the early boot stages.
> There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you can ensure that any
> hard-coded paths to those binaries are updated properly.
Surely this is the same, whether one copies the booting software to
initramfs or /sbin, isn't it?
> 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.
Again, isn't this the same for an initramfs?
> 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 :)
I've decided that, if push comes to shove, I'm going to go for /usr on /
rather than a fragile initramfs system. I've got everything bar / on
RAID 1/LVM at the moment, but I don't really use LVM, so I could
dismantle that too, losing all the baggage that brings with it.
Having said that, my system (including Gnome) is working perfectly well
with mdev, and see no reason why that shouldn't continue.
> --Mike
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
