On 2012-12-24, Dale wrote: > Alan McKinnon wrote: >> On Sun, 23 Dec 2012 19:03:25 +0200 >> [email protected] (Nuno J. Silva) wrote: >> >>> On 2012-12-23, Alan McKinnon wrote: >>> >>>> On Sun, 23 Dec 2012 12:22:24 +0200 >>>> [email protected] (Nuno J. Silva) wrote: [...] >>>>> What about just mounting /usr as soon as the system boots? >>>> >>>> Please read the thread next time. The topic under discussion is >>>> solutions to the problem of not being able to do exactly that. >>> Then I suppose you can surely explain in a nutshell why can't init >>> scripts simply do that? >>> >> It is trivially easy to create a circular loop whereby code required to >> mount /usr now resides on /usr. >> >> Which is the entire thrust of this whole thread. >> > > When I reboot, I get a lot of errors about /var being empty, since it is > not mounted yet. It appears it wants /var as well as /usr early on in > the boot process. It boots regardless of the errors tho. > > For the record Nuno, I have / and /boot on regular partitions. I have > everything else, /home, /usr, /var and /usr/portage on LVM partitions. > Until recently, I NEVER needed a init thingy and had zero errors while > booting. Once this 'needing /usr on /' started a few months ago, I was > told I would need one to boot. The claim being it was broken all the > time but odd that it worked for the last 9 years with no problem, might > add, I only been using Linux for the last 9 years but it also would have > worked before that. >
In your case, does it actually fail without an initrd now? It's just that I see lots of people saying "it doesn't work" or "it will silently fail", that's why I asked the question, I was looking for actual examples of how can this go wrong (other than just because the init scripts don't try to mount /usr before starting udev). Also, how does an initrd help solving the chicken-and-the-egg problem for a missing /usr? I suppose the LVM drivers create additional device files that are only created once udevd is up and running in order to process these events? (With the case of a regular partition being no problem just because linux apparently offers hardcoded files for some partitions in the first ATA controllers.) > So, Nuno, everything was fine until they started moving things to a > place where it shouldn't be. Now, we have people working on eudev which > will replace udev and allow us to boot with a separate /usr and no init > thingy either. Basically, putting it back like it was, for many years I > might add. -- Nuno Silva (aka njsg) http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/
