:: Re: [Dng] [dng] vdev status updates
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Author: Didier Kryn
Date:  
To: dng@lists.dyne.org
Subject: Re: [Dng] [dng] vdev status updates


Le 29/04/2015 23:54, Jude Nelson a écrit :
>
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Didier Kryn <kryn@???
> <mailto:kryn@in2p3.fr>> 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

     That's a very sensible reason; you may have noticed I like static 
linking :-) . Another argument is that /usr/bin and /usr/lib are bloated 
and may be mounted on a different partition, while basic tools in /bin 
and /lib/libc.so, which are needed at startup, are in the root filesystem.


     Didier