On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no> wrote:
I have been thinking about sorting out /usr being a separate mountpoint. Mainly because I keep getting bug reports that turn out to be caused by this.
The current status is that we move some tools from /usr to / in the hope that this will allow us to boot without /usr being mounted. This mostly works, but not quite, as there are still stuff left in /usr that are used by early boot (and mostly just fails silently).
This website created by the systemd folks sums it up nicely (just replace "systemd" with "initscripts" everywhere): <http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken>.
The solution they propose, and which I agree with, is to mount /usr from the initrd just as we mount / (an alternative solution is to just declare separate /usr as not supported, but I guess that would not make us popular).
Before working up a patch, I wanted to hear if there are any objections to this approach, and in particular that Thomas agrees that it is the right way to go.
A quick follow up: The next initscripts release will have the attached friendly warning in case you have a separate /usr which is not mounted from the initrd. -t
