On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 21:10, Rob OpenSuSE <rob.opensuse.linux@gmail.com> wrote:
On 8 July 2011 18:18, Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 18:43, Dr. Werner Fink <werner@suse.de> wrote:
I'd like to do some notes on the topic how become systemd or should I better say udev better integrated in the current system scheme regardless of the used init.
/usr should just be mounted from initramfs. That solves all the problems. The artificial split of / and /usr makes not much sense in today's setups. What / was for UNIX, is the initramfs for Linux.
That's good insight! If there's difficulties mounting /usr from initramfs perhaps it's better to not support seperate / & /usr.
Yeah, there is only really the option of the inside-initramfs mount to make everything work properly. We can not recommend running that on todays releases, not in the current, not in past releases. But things that worked in the past for people, should just continue to work as it is. It just might be that more errors are logged during boot because we made tools like udev and systemd to log an error when binaries mentioned in rules files are not available at boot time, we used to suppress these errors.
The complications of dependency rules in udev etc etc, probably won't be ready with great reliability.
I don't think there are any bigger changes to expect from people. There in no general support for the / vs. /usr split anymore. Only basic setups, like simple servers without any 'end user' software/hardware works reliably today.
Although it would be a wrench to lose "/usr", I think supporting the ro /, brings much more than supporting / & /usr with difficult manoevres; which tend to waste space seperating similar types of system data (bins, libraries & modules). I came across this "history" today "Ken & Dennis introduce UNIX" - http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=69235 .. amusing but it' rather shows how times have changed, and perhaps "accidental" tradition needs re-evaualating.
Oh, funny video. :)
If /usr does not have space for contents of /, less /tmp & /var, the installation has problems anyway. With bind mounts, large /srv directories and the like, could stay where they are, or be really /var/srv, with /lib, /bin,/sbin & /etc/ moving into same filesystem as /usr hierarchy.
The current idea is not read-only /, but to move _everything_ back to /usr, and have only the compat symlinks in /. /usr would basically be something like /System. /usr would contain allmost all RPM installed content. If people like to split off /usr to mount it read-only or to share it across hosts, they could do that just fine. The / would only contain the host-specific data including /etc, /root, /srv. The new-world-/usr would contain _all_ binaries and not miss half of them laying around on /. The / would be r/w, /usr would be r/o by default. Almost all content of an installed system would be r/o and could be safely shared that way, all host specific data is just r/w without all the silly hacks r/o / requires. Anyway, wherever we will end up with, the / vs. /usr split makes no sense for any reasonable setup. Mounting /usr separate makes a lot of sense in some setups, but the split doesn't make any in today's system architecture.
It might be better to use the "Major" version change to check openSUSE 11 installations, before upgrade and require things like seperate /usr to be gone before distribution upgrade. Also anything else, like acls & user_xattr's that might cause problems, to be sorted as well as requirements of software that could be forgotten and cause support issues. Providing a documented procedure (perhaps with simple helper scripts).
Those who don't care to follow advice, can accept the broken bluetooth etc, it was easy enough to see what referenced /usr on a box.
These problems exist for long, even in earlier releases. People who do that should be able to continue to do that. As said, it might just log errors if they install packages using udev and /usr. None of the tool like udev, systemd requires /usr itself, only packages using these services. If we want to fix it properly, we just make the initramfs /usr mount work. In the long run, all tools in / should just move back to /usr where they belong. It offers us more flexibility, better security, and more sane options to run all sorts of custom/specialized setups. Kay -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org