On 19/08/2013 11:31, pk wrote: > On 2013-08-19 00:49, Dale wrote: > >> Picking random message sort of. Isn't eudev still going to support a >> separate /usr? That is my understanding. If eudev is not then I may >> have to reconsider some things myself here. > > Yes, that is my understanding as well. But the "decision" to not support > a separate /usr lies higher up in the system hierarchy (as I understand > it). Gentoo as a system will not support a separate /usr if we are to > believe the conversation (I haven't seen any official notice of this > though). That is the sad part. The problem I have, as an engineer, is > that "everybody" says that a separate /usr is broken, that sysvinit is > broken without explaining why. In order to fix a problem you need to > know what is broken... The people who claims the brokenness are, imo, > hand waving and they've managed to convince higher uppers in the Gentoo > infrastructure (as it seems). I guess if you repeat something often > enough it becomes a "truth" or said person(s) just agrees to stop the > nagging.
It's not that separate /usr is broken - it's not. The issue is a separate /usr without an initramfs. And the issue ONLY occurs at early-boot time. The problem is that with modern hardware much code that was traditionally stored in /usr may be needed early in the boot sequence, before /usr is mounted. The obvious case is firmware and drivers, and the usual example cited is bluetooth keyboards. If you need keyboard input at this time, you need to have the bluetooth daemon running, which is on /usr, which is not mounted. The solution is to use an initramfs, and on a technical level it's not any different to needing a way to get the ext4 module off disk so you can mount /. Some may argue that bluetooth keyboards are a rarity and that's tough. Well, there's Macbook hardware, and phones which have soft keyboards. But many scenarios could exist, all due to the fact that hot-pluggable hardware can in theory run any arbitrary code to get itself up and running, and if that code is on a volume that is not mounted... The solution is obvious - all that code should be on / somewhere, or should be mountable using an initramfs. Do you see that although you and I can deal with this with relative ease, Aunt Tillie probably couldn't and the junior sysadmins I have to deal with certainly can't? Personally, I think that splitting / and /usr is a daft idea: a. I have multi-TB hard disks, completely unlike the 5M monsters that Thomson had to deal with in the 70s b. I haven't had /usr break on me during boot requiring busybox in maintenance mode for at least 5 years. Every startup failure in that time required a rescue cd anyway, and I always have one of those handy c. it IS useful for terminal servers, but those tend to have experienced sysadmins, and they really should be OK with an initramfs (or their vendor should ship one) I'm often at the front of the Lennart-bashing parade, and what he says often makes sense but only in his narrow view of the world, but in *this* case, I can't help but admit he does have a point. -- Alan McKinnon [email protected]
