[gentoo-user] Re: Anyone switched to eudev yet?

On 2012-12-24, Dale wrote:

> Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On Sun, 23 Dec 2012 19:03:25 +0200
>> nunojsilva@×××××××.pt (Nuno J. Silva) wrote:
>>
>>> On 2012-12-23, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, 23 Dec 2012 12:22:24 +0200
>>>> nunojsilva@×××××××.pt (Nuno J. Silva) wrote:
[...]
>>>>> What about just mounting /usr as soon as the system boots?
>>>>
>>>> Please read the thread next time. The topic under discussion is
>>>> solutions to the problem of not being able to do exactly that.
>>> Then I suppose you can surely explain in a nutshell why can't init
>>> scripts simply do that?
>>>
>> It is trivially easy to create a circular loop whereby code required to
>> mount /usr now resides on /usr.
>>
>> Which is the entire thrust of this whole thread.
>>
>
> When I reboot, I get a lot of errors about /var being empty, since it is
> not mounted yet.  It appears it wants /var as well as /usr early on in
> the boot process.  It boots regardless of the errors tho.
>
> For the record Nuno, I have / and /boot on regular partitions.  I have
> everything else, /home, /usr, /var and /usr/portage on LVM partitions.
> Until recently, I NEVER needed a init thingy and had zero errors while
> booting.  Once this 'needing /usr on /' started a few months ago, I was
> told I would need one to boot.  The claim being it was broken all the
> time but odd that it worked for the last 9 years with no problem, might
> add, I only been using Linux for the last 9 years but it also would have
> worked before that.
>

In your case, does it actually fail without an initrd now? It's just
that I see lots of people saying "it doesn't work" or "it will silently
fail", that's why I asked the question, I was looking for actual
examples of how can this go wrong (other than just because the init
scripts don't try to mount /usr before starting udev).

Also, how does an initrd help solving the chicken-and-the-egg problem
for a missing /usr?

I suppose the LVM drivers create additional device files that are only
created once udevd is up and running in order to process these events?
(With the case of a regular partition being no problem just because
linux apparently offers hardcoded files for some partitions in the first
ATA controllers.)

> So, Nuno, everything was fine until they started moving things to a
> place where it shouldn't be.  Now, we have people working on eudev which
> will replace udev and allow us to boot with a separate /usr and no init
> thingy either.  Basically, putting it back like it was, for many years I
> might add.

-- 
Nuno Silva (aka njsg)
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/