Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3318 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:29:03 -0700
Bill Anderson <bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > What will happen during boot, if partition /usr fails the initial 
> > filecheck? It can not be mounted, it has to be repaired first; but the 
> > system can not drop you into a repair mode with a shell, because the 
> > shell resides in /usr/bin/  
> Unix admins do not normally create a separate partition for /usr. In 
> Unix, it is a relatively static directory. 

Since I was in the Unix Development Environment group at
Digital when Tru64 (formerly Digital Unix formerly OSF/1) let me give
some history to put this into perspective. 
At one time it was common practice for the /usr file system to be
mountable. This was when disks were small. The /bin and /lib
directories were part of the root file system for boot purposes just
as /sbin was supposed to be for statically built binaries. As disks got
larger, the /usr directory tree was generally part of the root file
system and not a separate file system. Additionally, the reason for the
separation of the /bin and /usr/bin directories were eliminated. In
Tru64 Unix, the clustering system invented a context-dependent
symbolic link. This was added in Tru64 5.0. Since Tru64  Unix is
proprietary, the installer can force the /usr tree into the root file
system. I do know in Tru64 Unix 4.x you could place /usr in a separate
file system. 

-- 
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846