On Friday 06 August 2010 12:53:58 Cristian Rodríguez wrote:

El 06/08/10 12:28, Richard Creighton escribió:

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Linux needs the standards to be

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adhered to and not arbitrarily changed because it is convenient for lazy programming practices to be effected.

yeah, but the standards must make sense technically, otherwise is just Mumbo-jumbo. a notory example of such Mumbo-Jumbo is the LSB.

I think the standards set for /usr (in this case) are technically sensable unless you want to limit oS to desktop/laptop installations and have no VMs or a LAN with diskless workstations or small drives where space is a premium (eg, many older machines) where storing redundant copies of /usr on each machine is very wasteful. On VM's, the extra disk space for each VM to have a complete copy of all the /usr (Unis System Resources) files (which contain most, if not all, of the installed non-system applications like KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, many graphics editors...etc, etc., can be huge. Allowing /usr to be remote, eg, on another partition or even on another machine, allows much savings in disk space which even today translates into money saved. Some Mumbo-Jumbo actually has value even if you don't need it yourself at the moment, you may, even likely will need it in the future. Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On 08/06/2010 11:28 AM, Richard Creighton wrote:

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Please consider this; From the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS):

The Directory Structure

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/usr

/usr has nothing to do with users,

Think system users have no connection to /usr. Well try "echo $PATH" as a user

On Friday 06 August 2010 13:31:27 Donn Washburn wrote: then try it as root. Note /sbin as root but not as a user I didn't say USERS don't need /usr, quite the contrary, for virtually all non-system applications, the programs are in /usr. What the problem is that *during BOOT*, the users don't need /usr, only the system and only for items directly related to the boot process. Once booted, one assumes that other devices are initialized, partitions mounted, nfs or smb or cifs or other networked drives will be mounted and the files and programs contained therin would be available to users and root alike....just not while booting. If anything in /usr IS needed during boot, then it is in the wrong place, eg, it should be in /sbin or /lib or /boot which *are* in the root device and available during the boot cycle. Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

* Richard Creighton [2010-08-06 18:27]:

Please don't do it for that reason, do it to get the broken non-compliant issues fixed to bring OS back into the most flexible, compliant, expandable, useful, productive, fun platform available.

I certainly agree that it would be nice to have if it actually worked. But who'll do the fixing, apparently nobody has cared enough about it enough to fix it. It'd be nice to have a list of stuff which is actually broken. Is it only udev scripts? Bootscripts? Keeping it in its current state is also somewhat dishonest. -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:23:12 -0400 Cristian Rodríguez wrote:

it isnt going to work, See Kay's messages.

It works very well on servers etc., on everything that does not need (or even want) a fully dynamic and asynchronous boot. No wonder the first thing people try to disable as much as possible on servers is udev & friends... It is only the crazy desktop people where it is not going to work. Exactly those people that don't bring any money into the business... -- Stefan Seyfried "Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time." -- Linus Torvalds -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On Fri, 6 Aug 2010 13:12:59 -0700 Greg KH wrote:

On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 09:48:18PM +0200, Stefan Seyfried wrote:

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It works very well on servers etc., on everything that does not need (or even want) a fully dynamic and asynchronous boot.

Um, servers want a dynamic and async boot, do they somehow not require very large uptimes which require a quick boot cycle?

Greg, as you certainly know, servers usually take minute(s) from "reboot -f" until the VGA screen (or whatever equivalent) comes on again[1]. Then some more minutes until the memory is found, drives are initialized etc. On such a machine, the 20 seconds you can gain from grub to desktop are not relevant. And oh - there is no desktop anyway. AFAICT most of the "fastboot" efforts are centered around "start X as early as possible" which is totally irrelevant for any serious server machine. All the commercial software installed on those machines usually has some "sleep xxx" inside their init scripts anyway ;-) Those machine simply do not get rebooted. Period.

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No wonder the first thing people try to disable as much as possible on servers is udev & friends...

Really? Have you tried to disable udev on a recent system these days? For what good reason?

Not me. I just see what's being done here at the customer (which is probably one of the worlds largest 5 SLES deployments). Of course udev is not disabled, but everyone tries to make sure udev and HAL are not interfering with the system after initial bootup.

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It is only the crazy desktop people where it is not going to work. Exactly those people that don't bring any money into the business...

Um, our preload group is profitable, and growing.

I'm glad to hear that (really. It shows that not everything we did was a waste of time and that there is finally some gain from all the pain ;). But I'm still sure that getting rid of all the server subscriptions would be not a wise move for Novell/SUSE ;-)

And note, one of the first users of udev was very large systems with hundreds and thousands of disk drives, way back in SLE9.

But in SLES9 /usr on separate partition was still a supported setup (I know, because I did run the testcases for this setup ;) I can totally understand why Kay wants to get rid of all those "legacy features". It's just that I think it won't work out well at the customers I'm visiting. Maybe having a "not-so-dynamic" boot mode for servers, which can live with /usr being on a separate partition and a "fully dynamic mode" for desktops might be an option. Crazy requirements like "/usr on NFS which is mounted via 3G" would simply be rejected, so that in "server mode" we could say * everything that is needed to mount filesystems must be in / * only old ifconfig method is supported, no NetworkManager Then dbus and all that stuff would be out of question, making /usr not so important anymore. Just braindumping here of course... :) [1] e.g. SUN Fire X4170 or HP ProLiant BL460c G6 machines. Timed with a stopwatch. 1 Minute between "echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger" and VGA BIOS message. SUN with 24GB RAM, HP with 144GB RAM. Both machines are definitely not crap. -- Stefan Seyfried "Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time." -- Linus Torvalds -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

* Gerald Pfeifer [2010-08-07 18:31]:

On Sat, 7 Aug 2010, Stefan Seyfried wrote:

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I can totally understand why Kay wants to get rid of all those "legacy features". It's just that I think it won't work out well at the customers I'm visiting.

In my experience Kay is a lot quicker to dismiss something as "legacy" than (SLE) customers or (openSUSE) users. Don't worry, for the former we have people keeping an eye on the real customer requirements, but I certainly advise to be somewhat careful on openSUSE as well.

If this is business-critical to Novell why doesn't anybody ensure that NFS-mounted /usr keeps working? -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

Hello all, On 2010-08-09 T 14:16 +0200 Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Guido Berhoerster wrote:

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In my experience Kay is a lot quicker to dismiss something as "legacy" than (SLE) customers or (openSUSE) users. Don't worry, for the former we have people keeping an eye on the real customer requirements, but I certainly advise to be somewhat careful on openSUSE as well. If this is business-critical to Novell why doesn't anybody ensure that NFS-mounted /usr keeps working?

It is a fully supported scenario for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (and the releases before) and very likely will be a fully supported scenario for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.

Indeed, I confirmed that it has been a supported feature in all SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Linux/openSUSE releases at least since we officially supported the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard). Carlos E. R. also mentioned this on Friday. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEFILESYSTEM says: ----------------------------< snip >---------------------------- Rationale Shareable files can be stored on one host and used on several others. Typically, however, not all files in the filesystem hierarchy are shareable and so each system has local storage containing at least its unshareable files. It is convenient if all the files a system requires that are stored on a foreign host can be made available by mounting one or a few directories from the foreign host. [...] Here is an example of a FHS-compliant system. (Other FHS-compliant layouts are possible.) ┌────────┬───────────────┬───────────┐ │ │ shareable │unshareable│ ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤ │static │/usr │/etc │ ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤ │ │/opt │/boot │ ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤ │variable│/var/mail │/var/run │ ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤ │ │/var/spool/news│/var/lock │ └────────┴───────────────┴───────────┘ ----------------------------< snap >---------------------------- Q1: Is FHS compliance an important part of openSUSE as a Linux distribution?

It is not a top priority for Novell to see in openSUSE 11.4 and "ensure" is too strong a word from that perspective though it would be sad to see it being broken. Let's keep in mind: when it comes to openSUSE, Novell is just one stakeholder, even if one contributing a ton.

I fully agree. I think though, we should do a next step, and analyze if the requirements are also in the interest of openSUSE beyond Novell. Here what had been mentioned already in this thread: - Thin Clients - Virtual machines - all (other) use cases with "read only root" Q2: Are those use cases valid for openSUSE? If we agree to a "Yes" on both questions, then keeping "/usr" a shareable and static filesystem will remain a requirement for openSUSE -- and packages should be adopted accordingly. so long - MgE -- Matthias G. Eckermann Senior Product Manager - SUSE® Linux Enterprise - Server Product Line SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On Sat, 7 Aug 2010, Per Jessen wrote:

IMO, server bootup time is immaterial - servers are meant to run and run and run, booting them is an exception. Even so, when I reboot a server maybe once a year, I don't mind if bootup takes e.g. 5 minutes.

Actually, when bootup with a couple of hundred CPUs or thousands of LUNs has been taking 10s of minutes, customer did care. Which is why we fixed it for them. ;-) But, indeed, while a few seconds more or less can be very visible on your netbook/notebook or desktop, for most servers it's less critical unless it becomes too much. Gerald -- Dr. Gerald Pfeifer Director Product Management, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Appliances -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org