On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 12:22 +0200, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:13:45PM +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
Sure, they will just need an initramfs that can do that, if they want it to work in the future.
Actually, the long-term goal is to merge the useless split of / and /usr back to /usr and be able to mount /usr ro on every system. It's the same model as Android is doing with /system.
/usr will contain the entire system, and only /etc and /var will be host-specific. /usr can be ro and be shared between many machines of the same architecture. But all logic to set it up before init starts will be in in the initramfs. People are actually already working on it.
It has to possible to boot the system into single user mode maintenance without mounted partitions.
Sure, the initramfs can drop you to the rescue shell right before init would be started. It can do that already today. Also the initramfs image creator will create a specific rescue image on every box at install time, that can be used when things go wrong at the level before the system is available. The picture is a bit like /boot, and the rescue image, will no longer be owned and constantly updated by the distro, but owned by the box they are installed on.
I've no problem if this is done in initramfs just as a rescue mode even before mounting the root file system but for /usr this is a hard requirement for every big data server. Be aware that a s390x / and most ppc64 are not a smart phones nor net books.
They just don't fit into the pocket. :) But today there is probably more to learn from the phones than from the big boxes regarding the simplicity and reliability of the system layout and update management. They have proper read-only mounts, a single system partition, a rescue partition, a strict split between system-, host-, user-, 3rd-party-app, cache-data by default. We really need to get closer to how they work, and the mindless split between / and /usr is the first step to clean up the mess we inherited. Kay -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org