Re: [gentoo-dev] separate /usr without initramfs

[Dale]

William Hubbs wrote:
> 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


I have a separate /usr among others and always have.  The reason I do
that, /boot and / are normal partitions but everything else is LVM.  I
can adjust the size of everything BUT /boot and /.  At the time I did
that, the init thingy was not needed if I recall correctly.  I might
add, I've had to grow /usr and /var a couple times.  Before LVM, it
meant copying over to another drive, repartitioning and then restoring
to the old drive.  Time consuming and one wrong command could ruin a
install.

While I have a init thingy, I do not like it.  I've had a couple
failures already with those things.  Luckily I keep older kernels and
such for that.  If I had my wish, I would not need a init thingy, ever. 
It's just one more thing that can cause problems.  There's already more
than enough things that can break.  While I understand the problem comes
from upstream, I still think it sucks.  It's easy enough to have a
unbootable kernel as it is.  Adding another layer for booting to fail
should be avoided.  BTW, I use dracut.  I tried to build it other ways
but couldn't get it to work.  Bad thing is, when one fails even built
with dracut, I have no clue how it works really so no idea how to fix
other than using a older kernel or just rerunning dracut and hoping for
the best.

I'm also not looking forward to the other situation you mentioned
either.  At some point, having separate partitions won't be easy with or
without a init thingy.  I can't easily resize / without reworking the
whole thing.

Just my point of view on why I don't like the thing and wish I didn't
have to have one. 

Dale

:-)  :-)