Folks please at least read the explanation before suggesting or complaining.
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Fedora 17 Moves Forward With Unified File-System
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I was initially against this and I felt that not enough consideration was being given to why they were split in the first place. I have now read this and hastily switched sides.
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I've read the freedeskop wiki, I've read the 'explanation' about small disks and what not.
The historical justification for a /bin, /sbin and /lib separate from /usr no longer applies today. (More on the historical justification for the split, by Rob Landley) They were split off to have selected tools on a faster hard disk (which was small, because it was more expensive) and to contain all the tools necessary to mount the slower /usr partition. Today, a separate /usr partition already must be mounted by the initramfs during early boot, thus making the justification for a split-off moot. In addition a lot of tools in /bin and /sbin in the status quo already lost the ability to run without a pre-mounted /usr. There is no valid reason anymore to have the operating system spread over multiple hierarchies, it lost its purpose.
"Ken and Dennis leaked their OS into the equivalent of home because an RK05 disk pack on the PDP-11 was too small"
Chapter 3. The Root Filesystem
Purpose
The contents of the root filesystem must be adequate to boot, restore, recover, and/or repair the system.
To boot a system, enough must be present on the root partition to mount other filesystems. This includes utilities, configuration, boot loader information, and other essential start-up data. /usr, /opt, and /var are designed such that they may be located on other partitions or filesystems.
To enable recovery and/or repair of a system, those utilities needed by an experienced maintainer to diagnose and reconstruct a damaged system must be present on the root filesystem.
To restore a system, those utilities needed to restore from system backups (on floppy, tape, etc.) must be present on the root filesystem.
Myth #9: The /usr split is useful to have a minimal rescue system on the root file system, and the rest of the OS on /usr.
Fact: On Fedora the root directory contains ~450MB already. This hasn't been minimal since a long time, and due to today's complex storage and networking technologies it's unrealistic to ever reduce this again. In fact, since the introduction of initrds to Linux the initrd took over the role as minimal rescue system that requires only a working boot loader to be started, but not a full file system.
Code:du -d 1 -h / -x 16K /lost+found 4.0K /home 4.0K /opt 22M /lib64 4.0K /var 11M /sbin 16M /boot 4.0K /mnt 0 /dev 2.6M /lib32 0 /sys 4.0K /media 11M /bin 13M /etc 4.0K /usr 108K /chroot 0 /proc 11M /root 4.0K /tmp 86M /
And I do actually have an initramfs, it contains mdadm to bring up my raid1 and raid5's since it is no longer supported to have the kernel do it.
Myth #10: The status quo of a split /usr with mounting it without initrd is perfectly well supported right now and works.
Fact: A split /usr without involvement of an initrd mounting it before jumping into the root file system hasn't worked correctly since a long time.
So all in all, this move seems more like 'Fedora's / is a mess and isn't properly split as it should, lets just move everything to /usr and where it should be anyway, and do our own thing.'
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the FHS in the 'explanation' mailing-list thread. Also, I'm supprised the mentioning of /usr/local and /opt. As far as I understood, from the FHS obviously, is that /usr/local where applications that where installed locally on the host, say if /usr where on nfs. /opt was for 3rd party (closed src) applications and other 'add-ons'. I can actually even see an /opt/local, if /opt would have been an nfs share, but 1 system would be allowed to install a specific 3rd party package.Last edited by oliver; 27 January 2012, 07:19 PM.
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I'm all for this in general, but I use so much hand-compiled software, legacy software, etc., that it's going to be a royal pain. Basically I'm gonna end up having /bin and /lib and blah anyway, and end up symlinking them from /usr so that certain things will compile (especially stuff that doesn't use autoconf).
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Originally posted by Aquous View PostWhy move / -> /usr? Why not /usr -> / with /usr becoming a symlink to /?
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Improved compatibility with GNU build systems: The biggest part of Linux software is built with GNU autoconf/automake (i.e. GNU autotools), which are unaware of the Linux-specific /usr split. Maintaining the /usr split requires non-trivial project-specific handling in the upstream build system, and in your distribution's packages. With the /usr merge, this work becomes unnecessary and porting packages to Linux becomes simpler.
as a reason. Are they serious? That one is one of the dumbest reasons.
For everybody out there asking why:
who is using autoconf/automake the most?
and who isn't?
For me the move sounds idiotic. The split has always been for a very good reason.
/ contains everything you need to boot the system and put everything in place.
Mount the rest
Start the services.
Nice and clean.
Something fucked up /usr? No problem, at least you could boot and repair it. Now you need a livesystem. Oh, that one is slightly incompatible with the system you need to repair. Tough luck old boy!
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I think this is long overdue. The directory structure is a mess in Linux.
This model cleans it up a bit, improves compatibility, what more could you want?
Two thumbs up for fedora on this initiative
The beefy miracle sure seems to become beefy. Now only if they managed to squeeze BTRFS in there...
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