Hello > I come from a Unix background -- separate /usr was deprecated in the 1990's > with SVR4.2, I'm kind of amazed it took Linux so long to catch up.
Clearly I must have been working in a parallel universe - the commercial unix systems that I remember from the 90s did have /usr and / (some also had /opt and /usr/local in various forms) But regardless of this, what you are doing here is called an "appeal to authority" and so of limited relevance. Having a small safe userland to boot up the full system allows one to recover from a number of mishaps and permits complex startup routines. In the past this was separated out with / and /usr, now most of the startup logic lives in an opaque mess called initrd/initramfs which every distribution hacks up in its own so special way. I don't regard this as progress. A wiser decision would have been to merge the initramfs with /, so that / could optionally live in RAM and linuxrc can be normal init right off the bat - that would allow one to eliminate the complicated and brittle mess that we know as mkinitrd. Yes, /etc would need to be made persistent somehow. That would still be simpler than the current mkinitrd. If done smartly it would even allow one to have a "safe" /etc version permitting rollbacks from config finger trouble. regards marc _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
