On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 23:54:57 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote about Re:
[gentoo-user] /dev/sda* missing at boot:

> On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 13:52:22 -0400, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> 
> > After reading that, and other similar threads, I still don't
> > understand the benefits of a separated /usr.
> 
> Putting it on a logical volume is one advantage, allowing /usr to be
> resized should the need arise.

More than this, one can put /usr on a stripe set so that /usr/bin
and /usr/lib, two of the directories with the highest I/O traffic, can
be made more performant.  But this requires LVM, RAID or some blend of
both.  This, in turn, precludes that it be merged with /, unless the
initramfs grows even more to handle those extra DASD management
facilities.

The more I think about this merge of / and /usr, the dumber I think the
idea is.  As I wrote in an earlier message on this list, the initramfs
will be many times larger than the kernel itself.  Indeed, my /boot
partition is only 32 MiB, and that will be too small to contain all the
extra libraries and programs to run the initramfs script.

> > Mounting it read-only
> > seems the only sensible one, and then I think is better to go all
> > the way and mount / read-only.
> 
> Putting /etc on a read-only filesystem seems a really bad idea.

To say the least.
-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU #314465]
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dwnoon@ntlworld.com (David W Noon)
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