:: Re: [Dng] [dng] vdev status updates
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Author: Jude Nelson
Date:  
To: Didier Kryn
CC: dng@lists.dyne.org
Subject: Re: [Dng] [dng] vdev status updates
On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

>
>
> Le 29/04/2015 22:34, Hendrik Boom a écrit :
>
>> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 10:47:27AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>>
>>> I'm under the impression you can do most or all of what needs to be
>>> done in the actual init, rather than the initramfs. This gets a little
>>> complicated now that Linux has been "improved" by having /sbin
>>> and /bin be symlinks to /usr/bin, which might not be mounted in early
>>> boot, but aside from that, I think once you have possession of /bin
>>> and /sbin, then assuming that /etc is not a mountpoint, I think most
>>> other stuff can be delayed til the real init, always assuming that it's
>>> easier to put stuff in the on-disk init than in initramfs.
>>>
>> Is that Linux that has been "improved" by turning /sbin and /bin into
>> symlinks? Or is it Debian? Or the systemd collection of distros?
>>
>> -- hendrik
>>
>>      Here's the story I read about /usr, and it sounds like the truth:

>
>     When people built the first Unix machine, the first disk, containing
> /bin went full but they needed to add more files to /bin . They decided to
> put them on the second disk which contained user data and was therefore
> mounted at /usr. Hence /usr/bin. It was a technical workaround for
> disk-size limitation.

>
>     Nowadays some distros got rid of /usr but still make it a symlink to /
> because of softwares that rely on it. If Debian is now doing sort of the
> opposite, it must be some trick. I've nothing against; as long as you keep
> /usr, use it at your will; it's all about convenience tricks.



Even these days, in some UNIXes (OpenBSD comes to mind), /bin and /sbin
differ from /usr/bin and /usr/sbin in that they only contain
statically-linked programs. This is useful for doing things like upgrading
the rest of the system, so you have a way to recover from catastrophic
errors (like /usr or /lib becoming unusable).

-Jude