Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Let's redesign the entire filesystem!

[David Leverton <levertond@googlemail.com>]

On 14 March 2012 18:56, Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Whatever the arguments may be, the whole discussion boils down to the
> fact that the only people who seem to have a "problem" are those that
> have a separate /usr partition and simultaneously refuse to use an
> initramfs.

I wonder if it might help to go through the benefits of having a
separate /usr, and see whether they still work when /usr is mounted by
initramfs.  Hopefully that would either demonstrate that the initramfs
approach is fine, or reveal a concrete problem with it so we can start
talking about solutions.

(For the record, I don't have a separate /usr, but mainly because when
I've been setting up machines I've been too lazy to either 1) figure
out how much space to allocate to each partition, or 2) learn how to
use lvm so I don't have to worry so much about getting it right the
first time.  I'd prefer for the option to stay available, but not as
strongly as some people do.)

To start us off, the benefit that I'm mainly interested in (for
potential future use, as stated above), and I realise this is probably
pretty far down the list overall, is that OpenRC can run fsck at
shutdown instead of boot for non-/ filesystems, so as long as / is
small there won't be huge boot delays.  I imagine using initramfs
wouldn't affect this, as by the time the system's shutting down it
shouldn't matter how /usr got mounted originally.  It might be
affected if fsck etc got moved to /usr as has been mentioned, but if
that happened OpenRC would probably have to be modified to remount it
readonly at shutdown rather than unmount it, and presumably that would
allow the fsck to occur.

Would anyone else like to continue with their own favourite
separate-/usr reason?