[arch-general] /usr is not mounted. This is not supported.

[Tom Gundersen]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Dwight Schauer <dschauer at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been using Arch Linux for about 4 years now. I have it on a few
> important systems at work and it has been doing very well.
>
> This morning I saw "/usr is not mounted. This is not supported." in my
> boot up after a recent rc.sysinit update.
>
> What is this, bait and switch? I've been running Linux and BSD systems
> since 1996 and typically always have /usr in a separate partition (as
> well as /var, /home/ and /tmp, but lately been using a ram /tmp).
>
> Why does /usr even exist if it can't be on a separate partition? Why
> not just combine /usr/lib and /lib? And /usr/bin and /bin? And
> /usr/sbin and /sbin? Why have the distinction at all if it can't be on
> separate partition?

Several people already pointed out the relevant information about
this, but I thought I should offer my two cents as I was responsible
for the error message.

The situation is currently that lots of tools break silently if /usr
is not mounted at boot. In most cases you will not notice, and in the
cases you do notice it is really difficult to tell what is actually
going on.

>From time to time we get bug reports that are really difficult to
debug, and that eventually turn out to be due to a separate /usr. Once
we figure out the cause, we usually end up having to say, sorry, there
is nothing we can do about that, but in the meantime we have wasted a
lot of time. Therefore, we really want to get the message out there
that at the moment things simply don't work as they should with a
separate /usr. Then people will at least know that this is a likely
cause of any weird problems they experience.

There are two ways to solve this: either merge your / and your /usr
partitions, or make your initramfs mount /usr so init won't even know
that /usr is separate.

We are currently working on adding support for the second approach,
but we are not there yet (I have some patches against mkinitcpio to
add this, but they rely on a patch by Thomas against busybox that has
not yet landed upstream).

Cheers,

Tom