Re: [gentoo-dev] usr merge

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 8:27 AM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero@g.o> wrote:
> On 09/04/16 13:53, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> Put the very same stuff in the initramfs?  Most initramfs creation
>> scripts should already do this automatically, and with compat symlinks
>> even those that don't probably will still end up doing it anyway..
>
> The question is different: do they work reliably?
>

I've certainly haven't had many problems with dracut.  When it fails
it is usually because I'm doing something ELSE that is off-the-wall
and it just doesn't have a plugin for it yet.  (And in those cases it
isn't like the kernel tends to get it right without an initramfs.)

I'd certainly want to test it on a merged /usr, but I'd be surprised
if it doesn't work, since it was designed to run on distros that are
using a merged /usr.

> usr-merge does not solve any problem in itself (and it is totally
> backwards, if somebody wants to simplify would do /usr -> /)

I don't really have any devotion to the particular design, but half
the point of the merge is to allow /usr to be read-only, on a
filesystem remotely mounted, and so on.

In an ideal world, you might argue that / should just be a tmpfs or
something almost as ephemeral.  It is just a place you hang everything
else off of.

But, of course moving all of /usr to / solves the early boot issue.
But, if you're going to do that you might as well just put /usr on
your root filesystem and have the same thing.

The thing I like about the merge is that it basically puts all your
distro-supplied stuff in one place.  /usr basically becomes the OS
minus state.  If things started out that way and you just had a short
stub loader that gets things initialized, and I were arguing that
instead of that little initialization stub you should break up /usr so
that the root count mount /usr, would that sound all that compelling?
I think having it all in one mountpoint seems a lot more compelling.

-- 
Rich