[gentoo-dev] separate /usr without initramfs

[William Hubbs]

Hey all,

I have been advised to bring this topic back to the list before taking
any action, so here it is.

First, I need to clarify what I'm *NOT* talking about.

This discussion has nothing to do with whether or not you have the
split-usr use flag turned on; all of us officially have that on because
/bin, /lib* and /sbin are directories in the official Gentoo setup. In
other words, I am *not* talking about forcing the /usr merge.

Unfortunately, the concept of separate usr has gotten wrapped up in the
split-usr use flag and doesn't have to be.  For the record, I mean something
very specific when I say "separate usr". I am talking about the situation
where /usr is a mount point separate from /, so in this thread, let's stick
to "separate usr" for that situation. I am *not* even saying that using
separate usr is wrong or unsupported. You can even run separate usr with
split-usr turned off if you would like to do so.

Now for the use case I want to talk about, and that is using separate
/usr without using an initramfs to boot your system and pre-mount /usr.

If you do this, many things are broken, and this is why the binary
distros all use an initramfs if you do this. This configuration is also
unsupported officially in Gentoo [1] [2], and it is not shown as the
example setup in our handbook.

I want to hear from people who have / and /usr on separate partitions
and who are not using an initramfs.

If you are in this group, I have a very specific question. Why aren't
you using an initramfs?

Thanks,

William

[1] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20130924-summary.txt
[2] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/gentoo-news.git/commit/?id=a79dd69b0cca439bc0c483c9193c79e0554819d0